Traffic Reports: What You See Is NOT What Really IS

I have done an analysis of the website traffic in Google Analytics reports. Indeed, there is a traffic drop when comparing April and March.

Here is a short summary (also see the PDF attached):

Organic: -8.15%

Direct: -16.64%

Referral: -8.49%

Social: -61.80%

Other: -43.10%

As you can see all the sources gave less traffic in April, so there is no SEO issues. As you can see the Direct traffic has great decrease, which has nothing to do with SEO at all.

I believe it is a temporary activity decrease.

Another reason might be is that Organic Traffic section also contains keywords from Image Search while as your websites’ image (not pages) lost rankings. If you go to Entrance Keywords section in Google Analytics you will see lots of keywords like ‘plan’, ‘competitive advantage’ and others. Your website’s pages don’t rank for these terms, but your images do, because we optimize images when uploading blog articles as well. Another interesting piece of data to support this idea is an increase of traffic quality metrics (bounce rate, page /session and Avg. session duration). Entrances from the Image Search usually have high bounce rate – people just check the image and then leave the website. Unfortunately the high amount of ‘not provided’ keywords makes a detailed analysis hardly possible to make sure that it was really Image Search keywords that began to bring less traffic. I will do additional research to find a way to remove Image Search Keywords to be able to see a clearer picture.

After the SEO budget was considerably cut in Autumn 2013 we were forced to remove some links to your website but we were able to keep keywords with local intent on top positions on Google, besides other more competitive and popular general keywords (e.g.: IT Consulting (17) and IT consulting services (13), etc.) didn’t drop much, so they can be quickly brought to top once the budget can be increased again.

Here is a SERP for some target key phrases

IT consultants – 7

IT consulting company – 8

IT consulting Dallas – 1

IT consulting Texas – 2

IT consultants Dallas – 1

IT consulting firms Dallas – 4 (with sitelinks)

As you can see the target key phrases that we work on in regards to SEO rank well, we keep an eye on your rankings and keep your website link profile strong enough to reach the goals set.

In fact there might be issues (if image search and activity decline is not an issue) with performance of some of your most popular blog articles because some giant websites might have published content that outranks your articles for the key phrases that used to bring traffic. Please note that there is no a direct connection between the links we built for your website to rank for target terms and how other pages perform on search. Each link ads credits towards general authority of the website, but it is impossible to predict how each page would perform. 

I have attached another Google Analytics report for you see the traffic improvements for the last 5 months.

Organic: + 18.94%

Direct: + 54.46%

Referral: + 13.76%

In order to make blogging even more SEO-focused, we can do an analysis of the suggested titles and make recommendations on words/phrases to use in them and also other keywords/phrases to use in the body prior to articles’ writing. This will increase potential number of key phrases to be relevant for each article, but does not guarantee high rankings for each one or even any of them, depending on the key phrase competition.