Decline in traffic but no change in rankings

[ahw]

I'm comparing our best search traffic month in 2011 (March) with our current traffic (April)and have seen significant declines in traffic, despite no change in our rankings or even improved rankings for the same terms.  Trying to sort out an explanation.

We have been a white-hat SEO site since our inception over 10 years ago.  Our SEO consultant doesn't think we've been affected by any algo changes, at least not to any significant degree.

My only explanation for this possibly anomaly is:

• decrease in the use of the KW terms in search over time (how to determine?)
• generalized increase in PPC instead of organic search driving traffic
• possibility that Adv Web Rankings is no longer accurately collecting SERP rankings

Does anyone have any other thoughts or considerations that might explain the decline in traffic, despite maintenance or improvement in rankings?

Thanks.

[BedeFahey]

Hi Again,

The (Not provided) category isn't showing up in March 2011 because they only started obscuring data from logged in users in October of 2011. This might account for at least some of the traffic difference between 2011 and 2012.

I think this is the blog post that they announced the change via:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure-accessing.html

You can potentially get some idea of what terms the (not provided) traffic is coming in on by looking at the landing page. You can also use PPC data, but I'm a little fuzzier on how that is done as AdWords isn't something I use a whole lot of.

[irvingw]

I would certainly pay attention to your individual key phrases, but more importantly is the traffic source - check if Bing, Yahoo, Google, Direct or any other traffic channel is causing you the loss of traffic. Once you can determine the problematic traffic source, you can then investigate the keywords in that traffic channel. Analytics allows you to setup custom segments to analyze each traffic source individually. After you can pinpoint the problematic keywords, you should analyze what the competitors are up to as others recommended.

[AlanBleiweiss]

This was the very first thing that came to my mind on the issue.  Just because our rankings might not have dropped, it doesn't mean competitors haven't been working away at improving their click-through rates.

I would also look into whether the phrases targeted are no longer the most relevant - this requires a review of your target market(s) and the persona(s) behind them.

Just one example (though not necessarily the best example) is how more people within the search industry are referring to "inbound marketing" rather than just "SEO" lately.  Where you need to be careful though is to ensure the language shift like in this example, isn't just industry lingo - that it's actually a shift taking place within your market by people who aren't in the industry itself.

[ahw]

So I can be clear, if there is one landing page for the main KW phrase, but there are a number of KW phrases that drive traffic to that landing page, you are recommending looking at the traffic changes of those individual KW phrases.

For example.... if the main KW phrase and landing page is: healthy eating recipes. But we have 5-10 KW phrases that drive traffic to that landing page... look for the differences in each of those traffic channels as a possible clue. Is that correct?

thanks.

[ahw]

thanks... will look for on-page differences, if any.

Before we are comparing 2011 traffic to 2012... I don't see 'not provided' category for the march 2011 period.  if there's another way of obtaining this, would appreciate guidance.

I can share that the declines in actual traffic are significant, not even moderate. And this holds true for the top ranking KW terms.... as opposed to the long-tail.  making it especially disconcerting.

my great fear is that ppc is starting to overtake organic search search in very competitive search markets... given the number of sponsored offers between Google and something I'v been seeing...buzzads  that sits above google adwords in my browser.. hence a total of 8 sponsored links before you can see the organic search options. Not to mention has faint the sponsor link box has become.

thanks.

[ahw]

thanks... we recently updated our description tags to be more inviting and compelling. Our previous tags were simply re-do of the title tag. so I know our tags improved. I can go back and look at the competition.

thanks.

[irvingw]

You need to research on exactly what channel of traffic has declined and then you can start analyzing the cause of loss. I would spend time analyzing each traffic channel and check for things like unique search queries and unique landing pages per channel. I would also pay attention to the Google and Bing Webmaster tools and check for crawl issues.

[BedeFahey]

Have you looked into long-tail traffic yet, or the traffic being generated by (not provided) search terms?

I've found word clouds to be useful at analyzing changes in long-tail traffic. If you can pull April and  March search terms into two different spreadsheets, then use something like Wordle you can get a really generalized overview of your long-tail makeup.

Similar to RankSurge's answer - The other thing you might want to consider is if the format of the SERPs has changed. Are there video, photo, local, or other universal results-or rich snippets-that didn't used to show up alongside your site?

[RankSurge]

One of the first things I would check would be to see if the competition improved their search snippets. I've had clients enjoy great click thrus at the #3 spot in Google - because their messaging was more in tune with what the person was searching for.

That's one place to start.

Good luck!