Why Is Organic Traffic Down? Here's How To Segment The Data

As an SEO, there are few things that stoke panic like seeing a considerable decline in organic traffic. Getting to the answers isn’t always straightforward or simple, because SEO is neither of those things. The success of an SEO investigation hinges on the ability to dig into the data, identify where exactly the performance decline is happening, and connect the dots to why it’s happening. It’s a little bit like an actual investigation: Before you can catch the culprit or understand the motive, you have to gather evidence. In an SEO investigation, that’s a matter of segmenting data.

Using Data To Confirm There’s An SEO Issue

Just because organic traffic is down doesn’t inherently mean that it’s an SEO problem. So, before we dissect data to narrow down problem areas, the first thing we need to do is determine whether there’s actually an SEO issue at play. After all, it could be something else altogether. In which case, we’re wasting unnecessary resources chasing a problem that doesn’t exist.

Is This A Tracking Issue?

In many cases, what looks like a big traffic drop is just an issue with tracking on the site. To determine whether tracking is functioning correctly, there are a couple of things we need to look for in the data. The first is consistent drops across channels. Zoom out of organic search and see what’s happening in other sources and channels. If you’re seeing meaningful drops across email, paid, etc., that are consistent with organic search, then it’s more than likely that tracking isn’t working correctly. The other thing we’re looking for here is inconsistencies between internal data and Google Search Console.

Is This A Brand Issue?

Organic search traffic from Google falls into two primary camps: brand traffic and non-brand traffic. Non-brand traffic is directly affected by SEO work. Whereas, brand traffic is mostly impacted by the work that happens in other channels. When marketing efforts in other channels are scaled back, the brand reaches fewer users. Since fewer people see the brand, fewer people search for it. Either way, it’s not an SEO problem. But in order to confirm that, we need to filter the data down. Go to Performance in Google Search Console and exclude any queries that include your brand. Then compare the data against a previous period. Do the same for queries that don’t include the brand name. If non-brand traffic has stayed consistent, while brand traffic has dropped, then this is a brand issue.

Segmenting Data To Find SEO Issues

Once we have confirmation that the organic traffic declines point to an SEO issue, we can start zooming in. Segmenting data in different ways helps pinpoint problem areas and find patterns. Only then can we trace those issues to the cause and craft a strategy for recovery.

URL

Most SEOs are going to filter their organic traffic down by URL. It lets us see which pages are struggling and analyze those pages for potential improvements. It also helps find patterns across pages that make it easier to isolate the cause of more widespread issues. For example, if the site is losing traffic across its product listing pages, it could signal that there’s a problem with the template for that page. But segmenting by URL also helps us answer a very important question when we pair it with conversion data: Do we really care about this traffic? Clicks are only helpful if they help drive business-valuable user interactions like conversions or ad views.

Query

Filtering performance by query can help understand which terms or topic areas to focus improvements on. Sometimes, it’s as easy as doing a period-over-period comparison in GSC, ordering by clicks lost, and looking for obvious patterns. If there aren’t obvious patterns and the queries in decline are more widespread, that’s where topic clustering can come into the mix. Using AI for topic clustering helps quickly identify any potential relationships between queries that are seeing performance dips. The resulting list of semantic groupings can provide an idea of topics where a site’s authority is slipping in search.

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