Data Segmentation for Identifying SEO Issues When Organic Traffic is Down

Data Segmentation for Identifying SEO Issues When Organic Traffic is Down

Organic traffic loss is common, even for well-optimized websites. For business leaders, this kind of disruption creates immediate pressure since it often leads to missed sales opportunities.

Common Causes of Organic Traffic Decline

1. Google Algorithm Updates: Google search algorithm updates enable a shift in rankings, impacting site authority, content relevance or link quality. Even high-performance websites can lose rankings if they don’t align with the latest standards.
2. Technical SEO Issues: They include crawl errors, broken links and indexing problems that can be responsible for blocking search engines from accessing your site. Pages disappear from results if they no longer index or take too long to load. Further, mobile usability issues and Core Web Vitals failures also impact visibility. If the bot is not reaching or understanding your pages, down website traffic would be noticed.
3. Content decay: What once ranked on page one may be buried. If the content not updated or refreshed for over a year, it may no longer meet Google’s expectations.
4. Site Changes or Migrations: Reasons behind site changes include Common triggers like URL changes, redesigns, platform migrations or missed redirects.
5. Manual Actions or Security Issues: If your site is hacked, flagged for spammy links or manually reviewed for deceptive behaviour, organic web traffic can drop overnight.

Segmenting data to find SEO issues

Segmenting data in different ways helps pinpoint problem areas and find patterns.

URL

Filtering SEO organic traffic down by URL. It lets us see which pages are struggling and analyze those pages for potential improvements. It is also helping in finding patterns across pages that make it easier to isolate the cause of more widespread issues. Segmenting URL also enable us to answer a very important question about pairing it with conversion data.

For some sites, like online publications, traffic is valuable in and of itself because users coming to the site are going to see ads. But for brands looking to drive conversions, it could just be empty traffic if it’s not helping drive that primary key performance indicator (KPI).

Query

Filtering performance by query aids in understanding which terms or topic areas to emphasise for improvements. Using AI for topic clustering helps quickly identify any potential relationships between queries that are seeing performance dips.

• Go to GSC and filter performance by query, looking for any YoY declines in clicks and average position.
• Then export this list of queries and use your favorite ML script to group the keywords into topic clusters.
• The resulting list of semantic groupings can provide an idea of topics where a site’s authority is slipping in search.

When users search using specific terms, the type of content they’re looking for, and their objective, differ based on the query. Information, commercial, transactional, and navigational are the four different high-level categories to be considered in the user expectations.

Device

When the large majority of performance declines are attributed to ONLY desktop or mobile, device data helps identify potential tech or UX issues within the mobile or desktop experience.

While desktop shows a much larger decline in terms of click count, the percentage of decline YoY is fairly similar across both desktop and mobile.

Search Appearance

Using the search appearance filter in Google Search Console enables you to see traffic from different types of rich results and SERP features, which include forums, AMP top story (AMP page + article markup), education Q&A, FAQ, job listing, job details, merchant listing, product snippet, Q&A, review snippet, recipe gallery, and video. While in most cases, Google can generate these results as there is structured data on pages, except for Q&A, translated results, and video.

Google can crawl and utilize product schema on most pages – but there are some opportunities to improve that schema with additional data.

Featured Snippets

When featured snippets originally came on the scene, it was a major change to the SERP structure that resulted in a serious hit to traditional organic results.

Search Type

Search type is another way to filter GSC data, where traffic declines are observed despite healthy and consistent rankings. After all, web search is just one prong of Google Search.

To determine which search type or types are most responsible for the drop in performance, filter performance data by each of these categories. Then begin making the connections to the cause using the realization.

Geography

The company probably already has geo-specific performance tracking set up using a technology if it physically operates in particular states and localities. However, geographic information, especially at the city/state level, should not be disregarded by domains for online-only companies. Decline continues to catalyze examining geo-specific performance data.

Final Thoughts

Data segmentation is an important piece of any traffic drop investigation, because humans can see patterns in data that bots don’t. SEOs can find leads that indicate potential reasons by using data segmentation. It guarantees greater accuracy, less work, quicker responses, and quicker recuperation by focusing on the evidence.