Drop In Branded Traffic

[JonRaubenheimer]

Hi,

We took on a new client in March. Over the last few months I have noticed that their Branded Organic Traffic has dropped off considerably, around 20%. On further investigation I discovered that the drop off occurred between Jan & Feb this year (prior to us taking over). In Jan they launched a new site, the drop off seems to coincide with the launch of their new website. I also found out that their Page Rank had disappeared before the launch of the new website, and is still a PR/na.

My first thought was that they have been penalised. How likely is this on a very well known site which gets roughly 170K visits per month? Could the drop in Branded Traffic be due to a decrease in advertising budget elsewhere (to compensate for the cost of the new website, leading to less brand exposure)? Could it be that there are just fewer people searching for their Brand?

I guess the questions I am trying to find out are:

1. What are the reasons for massive drops in Branded organic traffic?

2. As an seo I am tasked mainly for optimising for non-branded organic traffic, is there anything I can suggest to the client to help get this traffic back?

3. If it is an algorithmic penalty (Panda, Penguin), how do I know which one? I have started with their links and disavowed known toxic links, fixed crawl errors, optimised their top pages etc etc. If it was a penalty and I mange to fix it, will their branded traffic return?

Any help with the above would be greatly appreciated.

Jon

[KarlBantleman]

PR and SEO do go hand in hand though, if they have an external/internal PR agency then use the coverage they provide and use it contact bloggers, put it on social media websites etc. It's something I do for our clients and works quite well. Use various branded links in the content and push that out to websites/bloggers that will help influence customers.

[JonRaubenheimer]

Thanks Karl,

I have been tasked with increasing overall traffic to bring this all back in line. The PR clearly lies with the client, we look after their search results (PPC & SEO). Is there anything from an SEO perspective I can do for their Branded Traffic? I am jsut conscious that the goals posts between branded and non-branded organic visits have moved considerably and I would need to get a lot more non branded organic visits to make up for the loss in brand visits? Almost too many;-)

[KarlBantleman]

Was there something on the website that was omitted in the new design? A tool/ news story etc. Maybe they were doing a lot more PR than they are now so it has resulted in less branded traffic. It does sound very strange but doesn't sound like it is a penalty because you would have lost your rankings which hasn't happened.

[JonRaubenheimer]

Hi Karl,

No loss in rankings for branded terms, just a lot less traffic year on year. I just found it so strange that after their site went live there branded search dropped from 67K to 49K in one month. I will do a lot more analysis around the (not provided), but I can't see how that would just happen in a month (over time perhaps).

[KarlBantleman]

Have you lost rankings for branded terms as well? If so then it's almost definitely a penalty. The drop in PR to n/a is very strange but I'd be more worried if the branded terms have gone. What are the rankings looking like at the moment? Any huge drops?

[JonRaubenheimer]

Hi,

Yes they are still ranking 1 for all their brand terms and I have been making sure all their title tags and meta data is properly optimised for their brand. Super baffled on this as non branded organic is fine;-)

[JonRaubenheimer]

Hey Karl,

Yes definitely looked at year on year and so far 20% down on all branded search queries (also checked queries in WMT over the last 3month). Only reason I thought it may be a penalty was this article and the fact that their Page Rank went to PR/na (does this happen randomly)?

"For algorithmic penalties, here are some sure-fire clues.

• Your website is not ranking well for your brand name any more. That’s a dead giveaway. Even if your site doesn’t rank for much else, it should at least do well on that one keyword.
• Any page one positions you had are slipping back to page two or three without any action on your part.
• PageRank for your site has inexplicably dropped from a respectable two or three to a big fat zero (or a measly PR of one)."

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/penalized-by-google/

[JonRaubenheimer]

Hi Spyder Trap,

(not provided) has been steadily increasing over the past few months but not to warrant such a large a drop. This drop was literally after the site went live in January, Searches for the brand name were down 20% on last year month on month, the queries are slightly seasonal (also looked at last year).

Will keep digging but I don't think it's the "not provided" - even though that is a pain;-)

Could some of it be in Direct Traffic??

[ydesjardins200]

I have to agree with SpyderTrap here. Compare year over year, most of the times it is seasonality. So you want to make sure you are comparing apple with apple. For some of my e-commerce clients for example there branded traffic keeps getting higher and higher in October, november, december and then it gets very low. So depending on your products or services it might affect your branded traffic.

Make sure the website is still optimize for there brand names. Some clients during redesign forget that they are not the only one competing for there brand name and you can only see there brand in the domain name. Is your client ranking #1 for all of there brand terms? Is there new competition for there brand name.

I hope it helps cheers!

[KarlBantleman]

Hi Jon,

What are the stats like year-on-year, are they ~20% down as well. If it coincided with the launch of the new website maybe it is worth asking them if they utilised all the correct redirects, if they didn't and Google is still trying to reach the new website and the old links point to the older domain then this could have an adverse effect.

It doesn't seem like a penalty to me because if it was then all your keywords would have reduced, not just the branded traffic. If they are a well known company, why not look at doing more PR, look at driving traffic that way.

[BrightHealth]

1. Was there an increase in "not provided" that would justify the drop in branded traffic? That can happen.

2. First, isolate the cause. Did you check seasonality as well? Is this a pattern or can it be attributed to more data gobbled up by not provided?

3. I would doubt any penalty would result in decreased rankings over branded queries only. If your non-branded traffic was still solid, I would keep digging in Analytics for the answer, unless the brand name is exact match for the query..