Need advice interpreting these changes in my search traffic

[schof]

I've recently made a few changes to my site based on some advice from the seomoz tool.  I've noticed some changes in the traffic data (see attached image) which I can't completely explain.

First, the good news is that total organic search visits is up 2%.  I assume this is the most important metric and I'm obviously happy with total increase in organic search.  At the same time the number of number of URL's entered on search is down 1%.  I think this can be explained by the fact that I removed some duplicate pages (like archives that had the same content as the blog post pages, etc.)

The part that I don't quite understand is that total number of non paid keywords sending search is down 3%.  That seems like an unexplained decrease that I can't really account for.

Any ideas on how to interpret this?  Is it also possible that a single week's results can be misleading about how well your SEO efforts are paying off?

20120711-j4ti8ynwi1hn4rbrsppe167m6.jpg

[BedeFahey]

Hi Sean,

I'd be wary of inferring too much from one week's worth of results. Depending on the site, a 3% variation could just be weekly fluctuations.

A few things might help shed some light on the situation:

When did you make the changes? It's possible that you can rule out your changes as the cause of the differences by figuring out if the search engines have indexed them yet.

I'd take a look at Google Analytics in depth and see if there's any kind of weekly/month variance across at least a year of data. Maybe the first week of the month gets more traffic historically - unfortunately I've found SEOmoz doesn't provide data back far enough to catch this kind of thing.

I'd also use GA to compare month-to-month traffic and see if there are any keywords or phrases that are receiving less traffic for each portion of the month.

Have you seen any ranking changes? There's a slight difference in URLs receiving entrances compared to last week. These might account for a drop off if a page has stopped ranking for a specific phrase. I'd be surprised if you lost traffic by removing those duplicates you mentioned, as it's less common for duplicate pages to rank twice for the same result, or for them to rank differently for different results.

Again, it could easily just be normal variation, but the above things are where I would start.

[polarking]

Did you compare the data in Google Analytics? The drop doesn't seem that hard of drop. You may also check Google insights to see if traffic for those keywords have also dropped