As an SEO, there are few things that stoke panic like seeing a considerable decline in organic traffic. People are going to expect answers if they don’t already.
Getting to those answers isn’t always straightforward or simple, because SEO is neither of those things.
The success of an SEO investigation hinges on the ability to dig into the data, identify where exactly the performance decline is happening, and connect the dots to why it’s happening.
It’s a little bit like an actual investigation: Before you can catch the culprit or understand the motive, you have to gather evidence. In an SEO investigation, that’s a matter of segmenting data.
In this article, I’ll share some different ways to slice and dice performance data for valuable evidence that can help further your investigation.
Using Data To Confirm There’s An SEO Issue
Just because organic traffic is down doesn’t inherently mean that it’s an SEO problem.
So, before we dissect data to narrow down problem areas, the first thing we need to do is determine whether there’s actually an SEO issue at play.
After all, it could be something else altogether. In which case, we’re wasting unnecessary resources chasing a problem that doesn’t exist.
Is This A Tracking Issue?
In many cases, what looks like a big traffic drop is just an issue with tracking on the site.
To determine whether tracking is functioning correctly, there are a couple of things we need to look for in the data.
The first is consistent drops across channels.
Zoom out of organic search and see what’s happening in other sources and channels.
If you’re seeing meaningful drops across email, paid, etc., that are consistent with organic search, then it’s more than likely that tracking isn’t working correctly.
The other thing we’re looking for here is inconsistencies between internal data and Google Search Console.
Of course, there’s always a bit of inconsistency between first-party data and GSC-reported organic traffic. But if those differences are significantly more pronounced for the time period in question, that hints at a tracking problem.
Is This A Brand Issue?
Organic search traffic from Google falls into two primary camps:
- Brand traffic:Â Traffic driven by user queries that include the brand name.
- Non-brand traffic: Traffic driven by brand-agnostic user queries.
Non-brand traffic is directly affected by SEO work. Whereas, brand traffic is mostly impacted by the work that happens in other channels.
When a user includes the brand in their search, they’re already brand-aware. They’re a return user or they’ve encountered the brand through marketing efforts in channels like PR, paid social, etc.
When marketing efforts in other channels are scaled back, the brand reaches fewer users. Since fewer people see the brand, fewer people search for it.
Or, if customers sour on the brand, there are fewer people using search to come back to the site.
Either way, it’s not an SEO problem. But in…
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