SEO & CPC
-
So...I know Google secret sauce is just what secret but on a couple occasions I've seen a Phenomenon occur that I'd like some help understanding. I work at a fairly new eCommerce sit called www.savvisdirect.com. We have the normal new site desires...more traffic. Most of our traffic is coming from CPC but we were seeing about a 33% increase in organic wk over wk, until...we drastically cut our CPC spend on Google for a wk. Then organic dropped by about 1/3'rd. Nothing else changed, that's it. I know Google says that CPC spend doesn't affect rankings but I've seen this phenomenon a couple time @ a couple different sites & I'm getting to the point where I just don't believe it. What's your perspective on this?
-
I have seen phenomenon like this before, but believe it could stem from the pausing of the ppc campaigns (I have also seen an increase in organics after a paused campaign for competitive keywords).
Once a ppc campaign is paused, your repeat visitors should drop and your CTR may improve for organic positions. Since some people believe that traffic/ctr are computed in their Algorithm this could shift your rankings.
If Google did do this, I think the FTC or some other agency would be down their throats. However, who knows....
-
Another possibility is that you don't have auto-tagging enabled in Adwords. This can cause CPC traffic to be misattributed as Organic traffic in Google Analytics. This recently happened with one of our sites. Make sure you have auto-tagging enabled, and look back at the landing pages for your Organic traffic in GA and make sure they were being attributed properly.
-
Most likely it's a coincidence. Google traffic & rankings fluctuate all the time, especially for new sites.
Google does take user experience into account in its rankings, so there could be an off-chance that somehow the decreased CPC traffic had an impact on SEO. The only way to know for sure would be to increase your CPC spend again, and see if SEO traffic increases. Then cut it again, and see if it impacts your search traffic. If you can repeat this a few times, you will have a strong case for causation there.
However, I personally think that it's unlikely.
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
-
Disabling Hubspot AMP plugin - impact on GA
Hello, all!
Reporting & Analytics | | SimpleSearch
What impact have you seen if you've used the Hubspot AMP plugin and then disabled it?
We saw a big jump in sessions, which is weird because GA was tracking AMP pages. I'm trying to wrap my head around why this is happening but my brain isn't working 🙂0 -
Clicks, impressions, CTR, & position decreased after adding meta descriptions
A website that I was working on did not have meta descriptions, had poorly optimized meta titles, and URL structure. I created optimized descriptions and titles for each page. I also updated the URL structure of select pages and created 301 redirects. Since I did this I noticed that my clicks, impressions, CTR, and position all decreased on Google Search Console (I just setup Search Console so I only have 1-week of data). Traffic on Google Analytics is about the same. Is this normal?
Reporting & Analytics | | rx3000 -
Drupal SEO Issues
Hi, I have two questions regarding my enterprise website. It is built on the Drupal CMS. First, and in looking at Google Analytics, I'm seeing more than 6k pages listed, but over 5k have received less than 10 page views in six months. In fact, most of them are not really content pages at all. The URLs I'm seeing listed, which to me indicates actual crawlable content in GA, shows pages like this: http://www.domainname.com/node/2153
Reporting & Analytics | | jaccardi62
http://www.domainname.com/company/careers?gnk=apply&gni=8a87142e4d086a73014d2a0d65242b8e&gns=glassdoor+free
http://www.domainname.com/blog?page=1
http://www.domainname.com/resources/videos?field_video_category_value=all&page=4&page=1
http://www.domainname.com/search/site?search_api_views_fulltext=talent+pool What is the problem here? Why are these non-pages being indexed as content and why are they showing up in GA? Second question is about my blog and blog best practices. While I know blog content is important for SEO, why is my site blog pagination being indexed as content. For example, these "pages" are showing up in SERPs: http://www.domainname.com/blog/tag/business_intelligence?page=2
http://www.domainname.com/blog/topic/expansion?page=5
http://www.domainname.com/blog/weeks_news_april_26 What is the best way to fix this? Thanks in advance for your help!0 -
Does Google encryption of keyword data impact SEO revenue reporting in Google analytics?
Hi there, I know Google has been encrypting SEO keyword data which they rolled out in September 2013. My question is - will this impact SEO revenue figures reported in Google analytics? I have been monitoring SEO revenue figures for a client and they are significantly down even though rankings have not lowered. Is this because of Google's encryption? Could there be another reason? Many thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | CayenneRed890 -
Why am i getting a flux of increase in Impressions on my site & then it decreases
They guys. Hope everyone is having a great week. I wanted to get some inputs from you guys in regards to what is happening to my site that i quite don't understand. Every month or so i get this influx of high visibility with impressions for my keywords and then the impressions go away but my rankings still keep going up. Has anyone experienced this before and can give me some insight on what is going . Why do i get such a big jump and then it dies off only to return again a month later or 2 months later. I know you guys want probably some info from my site or from analytics or webmaster tools so i will provide as much as i can . For now i have included a screen shot. ScreenShot2013-06-04at31220PM_zps0d02f5fc.png ScreenShot2013-06-04at31134PM_zps5bb81b68.png ScreenShot2013-06-04at31134PM_zps5bb81b68.png ScreenShot2013-06-04at31220PM_zps0d02f5fc.png
Reporting & Analytics | | BizDetox0 -
Wordpress SEO vs Regular Site SEO
Hey Mozzers I'm building a Wordpress-powered site (self hosted on different domain). I know there are different plug-ins and whatnot for Wordpress SEO, but what exactly am I getting myself into? Am I required to use these plug-ins even if I already know how to do regular SEO on-page coding, or are they mainly dumbed-down tools for mom-bloggers to use? Am I still able to use Google Analytics as I am with a regular site?
Reporting & Analytics | | Travis-W
What else is there to think about? Thanks!0 -
Unexplained Crawl Diagnostic Errors & Opencart
Hi, I've been looking at the crawl diagnostics for my site and trying to fix the errors that are showing up but Seomoz is producing some strange results. It's saying pages are duplicated upto 16 times but those pages dont exist. It's adding "page=3", "page=4" to the end of the product URL but I don't see how it's finding those pages, nothing on the site(as far as I can tell) is linking to them. There is no "page=3", just the one product page. Again on the duplicate content it's saying under the "other URLs" there's URLs like "http:///product-a" but again I don't see where it's finding these URLs and obviously those URL's dont work. Those three slashes aren't a typo either. So far I've reduced the amount of errors from 2,005 to 543 but the rest of them I can't make sense of. Also, what does one do when you have two products, eg: "product-a-white" and "product-a-black" to prevent Seomoz from seeing duplicates? Canonical links wont work because there's no parent item, just those two. Google Webmaster tools doesn't seem to have a problem though. Using Opencart 1.5, if it helps. Cheers,
Reporting & Analytics | | AsOneDesign0 -
What is the SEO Impact of Adding a Directory to URL
I would like to add a new directory named “products” for all of the product detail pages on my site. Instead of having the URL for a product be “mysite.com/product-details-page.aspx” we would like to change it to “mysite.com.com/products/product-detail-page.aspx.” I want to do this to enable us to add product pages to our traffic funnel analysis by filtering visits to the "product" directory - right now we can't track visits to product pages in the funnel because they are just one-off the main site. I know this change will require redirects for every single product. Is there anything else that needs to be done? My main question is, will this change negatively impact the SEO value of the product pages? We have several product pages ranking in the SERPs, and I don't know if pushing them one directory further will change that. Thanks for your input!
Reporting & Analytics | | pbhatt0