I'm losing search traffic, is it time to hit the panic button?
Image courtesy of: star5112 on Flickr
Nothing is worse for the budding online businessman than to see their traffic numbers plummet...particularly their search numbers because they are often the least understood form of traffic. Often search traffic is oversimplified as, "Work hard in SEO and link building to get top positions and the traffic will magically appear."
But like any business, it's just not that simple. I was working with a site earlier today and was a bit puzzled as to why there would be a pretty substantial drop in traffic over the last week after a rising tide of gains. Knowing that my observant client would have questions, I dove in to see what the deal was. Here was my approach.
1. Did our rankings take a dive?
This has to be your first thought in this situation. A simple rank check can usually give you the answers to this one. However, the site I was working with is a very new site that just recently got out of the sandbox and started climbing the ladder for competitive terms. So with largely long tail traffic (and over 3,000) products, I had to be more creative. Another extremely valuable tool here can be Google Webmaster Tools - which will allow you to see historical trends of your most visible terms week to week.
2. Did we get a penalty or lose site authority we had gained?
I went back a few weeks in analytics and grabbed several hundred random listings of long tail terms and ran those through rank checker. The thought here was that even though I hadn't been following the rankings for these terms, that most of them should maintain high rankings if we were getting clicks only a few weeks ago. My sample showed that the vast majority of the terms still held solid first page rankings. So this wasn't the culprit either.
3. Is this a seasonal trend?
This was a new business for me and my client, so I had no historical data to work with myself, so it was time to start looking at competitors. Quantcast can be great for this if you have competitors who have quantified sites and share their results. You can get accurate traffic numbers and really look for trends. Sure enough, after a pretty substantial search I started finding trends in quantified sites (as well as extremely high volume non-quantified sites) that seemed to tell me that this was most likely a seasonal issue.
While I will continue to keep my eye on the search traffic trends, I thought the thought process here would be a valuable thing to share with online business owners and small businesses investing time in SEO. It's easy to panic and start making changes to a strategy when it appears you're not getting results.
Be sure to do your due diligence, as this example shows, the strategy might not always be the problem.
About Adam Henige
Adam Henige is Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing, an online marketing company specializing in SEO, PPC and social media. Adam heads the SEO and link building efforts for Netvantage and has been a contributing blogger for industry publications like Search Engine Journal and SEOmoz.
Tags: analytics for seo, high rankings low traffic, keyword selection, link building, losing search traffic, SEO
