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
-
Does Search Console data include GMB traffic? Branded CTR is 37.8%- Good or Bad?
Hey all, Per Search Console our branded keyword CTR is 37.8%. But when that keyword is searched our GMB listing shows up on top of the #1 result. For the same 90 day period GMB shows another 35% visits to our GMB (based on the number of impressions and visits to our GMB page) listing when the same keyword is searched. My question is this. Does Search console data include clicks that came from our GMB listing or not? My thinking is like this: If GMB traffic is not calculated in search console then it means that 72.8% of people looking for our brand will end up on our site on way or another 9organic #1 result plus GMB listing visits) We are also doing PPC for this very keyword that has gets almost 20% of the remaining traffic. So after adding all up we are loosing about 8% of our branded traffic to people who are doing adwords. When you search our brand you normally see 2, 3 competitor's adwords ads. Does anyone know how this works exactly? And if you don't mind sharing your branded keyword CTR's, so I can compare to ours please. I would love to compare to a site that actually has a GMB listing ranking for the same keyword Thanks in advance, Davit
Reporting & Analytics | | Davit19850 -
Drop in indexation but increase in organic traffic
We've had a puzzling drop in indexed pages on our ecommerce website. My crawl returns just over 25k items. Until 19/6 we had about 23-24k indexed. Then we experienced a sudden drop from 19/6 to 26/6: from 23,400 to 18,999, losing 4.4k pages from one week to the next. At the same time, our organic traffic has not decreased, it actually increased, however, it's only been a couple of weeks so that may be coincidence. A few things that have happened during the past few weeks: 31/5: we implemented pagination on category pages to avoid issues with duplicate content - could it be that this led to a decrease in indexed pages 3 weeks later? However, I can only find about 1.5k pages in my crawl that are page 2+ 18-19/6: we had some website outages over the weekend; as a B2B business, we don't get much traffic over the weekend, so I can't see an impact to traffic. However, the following week, indexation dropped by another 250 (then stayed the same this past week), so I don't think this was a factor. 21/6: we retired another website and migrated it to our main website. However, all pages were redirected to existing pages so no new pages were created for the migration. This doesn't really explain a decrease in indexation, but may account for some of the increase in organic traffic; however not all as the retired website hardly got any organic traffic. So, should we be worried? As our website is quite large, it would probably be quite difficult to pin point exactly which pages dropped off the index, but a loss of 19% of pages is quite significant. Then again, it doesn't appear to have negatively impacted organic traffic... Have you got any suggestions for what I should be looking at to find out what happened? Should I be worried at this point? I will definitely continue to have an eye on how our organic traffic (and indexation) develops but I am not sure if there is anything I can do at this point. I'd appreciate your advice on this, to make sure I am not missing something blindingly obvious. Thanks! RmWaNib JJm4tC3
Reporting & Analytics | | ViviCa10 -
Drop in google.com / referral trafic
Hi, On one of our sites (after the release of a new version, including redirections), we've seen a drop in referral trafic from google.fr (france). I know that this trafic usually comes from Google Images but it doesnt seem to be the case this time. The referal path is "/" and not "imgres" as it usually is when it comes from google images. The search trafic hasnt dropped tough... The site is a job listing site. We also saw a drop from indeed.com, I guess their crawler got lost in our new site... Any idea on the possible google site it could come from? Thank you,
Reporting & Analytics | | AdrienLargus0 -
My Domain Authority Dropped Dramatically..Can Someone Tell Me Why??
Over the last month or so my Domain Authority, my MozRank and MozTrust have all dropped off considerably. I haven't been doing anything different. So I don't know where to turn or what to do to get it back to where it was. The effects are horrible on my SEO. Can anyone out there tell me what it is I can do to why they dropped? Or more importantly, how can I improve it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Caseman0 -
Search Traffic Drops Before It Improves?
I'm working on a site with tons of great, useful content....the owners of the site implemented a new site layout and design (complete overhaul) and they were lacking basics such as meta descriptions, 301 redirects, and, shockingly, they had the same Title tag for every single page on a site with thousands of unique how-to articles. Unsurprisingly their traffic dropped by about 300%. They generate most of their traffic from people learning how to build stairs, how to install crown molding, and other related matters. Beginning last Thursday I've been performing basic on-site SEO, things like having unique titles for each page and similar tasks. The week from Thursday when I began until yesterday (Wednesday), Google traffic dropped -29.73% - 17,715 vs 25,210 I believe this is a normal part of the "Google Shuffle" -- does anyone have a Matt Cutts link or similar proof that this is a normal part of the process?
Reporting & Analytics | | wattssw0 -
Reasons for drop in URLs Receiving Entrances Via Search
Hi I'm having trouble understanding why I'm getting the results I am for my organic traffic data. I've been focussing on a few keywords throughout my website and the most recent results show that there is a big increase in the Organic Search Visits and the Non-Paid Keywords Sending Search Visits for both Branded Keywords and Non-branded Keywords, but the results for URLs Receiving Entrances Via Search are the complete opposite. Down by a few percent. I don't understand why this would happen and was hoping that someone could maybe explain and give a few reasons for why this is happening and maybe give some tips on how to stop it from happening in the future if possible. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Bonx0 -
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 -
Drop in rankings
Hey Mozzers, In the past week 8 of my keywords have drastically dropped and I have no idea why. We had been doing link building campaign and things were lookign good. We stopped it and crash, all the kerword rankings dropped. Would be awesome if someone couls shed some light onto this one? the site in question is www.gunshotdigital.com thank you so much!
Reporting & Analytics | | vijayvasu0