Branded terms CTR drop
-
Moz Hivemind,
I'm working with an ecom beauty brand and retailer who re-platformed their website at the end of August last year. Their CTR dropped from 70% plus for branded terms to 50% over night and has steadily declined ever since, down to the low 30s as an average the last few months.
Their rankings for branded terms have remained in the number 1 position, despite a slight blip at launch, which is to be expected.
They admit that some new distribution deals with major retailers have added some competition to the mix, but much later in the year.
I could totally understand a rankings drop and an initial hit, but has anyone seen anything like this before, is there something on the new site that could impact CTR like this, either in the SERPs or perhaps a reporting issue?
As the click itself is taking place in the SERP and their rankings are solid, other than the meta description, which they swear was unchanged the first few months after launch, any ideas what could be happening here?
Thanks so much.
-
Yes, first lesson: don't anchor text spam your site in comments like these as it's pretty obvious you tried to score a link with this comment. So stop doing that and focus on creating actual value.
-
Thanks everyone, all good answers, Title tags I will take a look at, but shouldn't have changed a great deal if at all... but the devil is in the detail.
Branded search ppc will definitely have played a part as well, including their own activity.
-
Do they have any insights from Google Ads on their branded keyword campaigns? That would usually be my first guess, somebody started bidding on their brand keywords which would take at least 10% away likely from your regular organic clicks by just pushing it down the page.
-
Go to archive.org to see your old title tags.
-
They swear the meta descriptions were unchanged, what about the title tags?
-
Your SERP CTR can drop when Google changes the SERP interface. They can slap more images, ads, videos, "people also ask" , news and various types of rubbish that absorb the clicks before your organic rankings are seen. Competitors above or below you could start adding kickass prices, free shipping, or free beer to their title tags.
.... but, my usual suspicion is that the developers monkeyed with something.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Drop in Domain Authority
Hi there, Our domain Authority has dropped significantly from 26 to 19 over the last month. This had been fairly stable over the previous 18 months. We haven't done any significant work to the website that I could point to. Does anyone have any ideas why this would happen? Any recent Google Updates that could be the cause? Regards Andy
Reporting & Analytics | | andy_simpson1 -
Can the end of a competition cause a drop in organic visitors?
Hi everyone, Over the last six months I've been running a few competitions on my largest site, but noticed a very large decrease in organic sessions just after the third one ended. For reference, the site is ~10 years old and gets a couple of million sessions per month.Organic sessions throughout last year and before the holiday periods were around 800k/month, which then increased by 50% during the holiday period alongside a competition I ran.These competitions double the pages per session and add another 1.5 minutes onto session duration. At the end of one of the competitions this year, daily organic sessions halved overnight and are now below the baseline of last year - and not improving. Some possible causes include; Google update - unlikely, because the date of the drop doesn't coincide with any increase in SERP volatility that I can find The extremely quick overnight drop in engagement (pages/session and session duration falling back to pre-comp baseline) caused Google to believe our site to be less popular and thus less deserving of rankings Visitors who've been bombarded with month-long competitions are sick of seeing them and are not searching for my site so often Email tagging - in the week before, UTM tracking parameters were added to all emails (of which there are a lot of subscribers) - as the number of Email visitors in Analytics increased, Organic did slightly decrease at the same time. I think this is unlikely, but I wonder if somehow some of our email visitors were previously being classed as Organic as well as some being Direct Incorrectly tagged as Direct - at the same time as the organic drop, Direct traffic doubled - it has since decreased back to just above the Direct baseline, however Organic has not improved I'd just be interested to know if anyone has any experience with something similar happening and, if so, what do you think the cause was and how did you rectify it? Thank you very much for your input in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | serges780 -
Curious, anyone ever had over half of their indexed links drop on an e-commerce site?
In a year went from around 300k indexed pages to around >100k according to GWT. Could this be duplicate content issue, lost links, spam, aged links or all of the above? either way an audit is in order. Thanks! Chris
Reporting & Analytics | | Sundance_Kidd0 -
Drop in direct traffic
Hi, I help look after two websites and have been tracking traffic sources for a couple of years. I have noticed that both sites have seen a drop in direct traffic over 2 years. Has anyone else noticed this and do you have a hypothesis as to the reason? Overall, on both sites traffic has increased. Thanks, Amelia
Reporting & Analytics | | CommT0 -
Drop in direct traffic & spike in Adwords, any relation?
So I noticed a significant (around 50%) drop in Direct traffic in analytics to one of my websites (compared to last month). I've also noticed a spike in Adwords for around the same number of sessions. The drop in traffic is pretty much isolated to one specific page, and it is the same page involved in the spike in Adwords. Is it possible that Google was not recognizing a portion of the Adwords traffic? That's the only theory I have, but we haven't changed anything with their tracking or Adwords, so I'm a little hesitant to go with that theory.
Reporting & Analytics | | KiyoW0 -
Large Drop in Direct Traffic
We recently experienced a large drop in direct traffic. Search and referral traffic remained steady but direct traffic dropped by over half. I'm having trouble pinpointing what would have caused this drop. Any ideas or suggestions for investigating the cause in a drop of direct traffic?
Reporting & Analytics | | AxlsCloset0 -
Want to link to GA profile, but the one I want is not showing in drop-down
How can I manually add the correct Google Analytics data in to my account? The two options I see on the drop-down are not the ones I want to select and I don't see a way to do it manually. Help!
Reporting & Analytics | | Uniqueson0 -
Drastic keyword position drop from time to time
Hey guys, I'm having the following issue. My keyword position in SERP is usually 10-11 but sometimes (like once a month or so) it drops to like to position 46 or something of that kind. Why would that be happening and what can I do to avoid that stuff?
Reporting & Analytics | | VinceWicks0