Panic to Precision: SEontheBeach 2025

Finding the Real Cause of an SEO Traffic Decline. Presentation was recorded and viewed at SEontheBeach in Castellón, Spain.

Transcript

1. Panic to Precision Finding the Real Cause of SEO Traffic Decline
2. Hello from the Co 2 Gray Dot Co SAM TORRES Chief Digital Officer Data & dev nerd SEO Mermaid™
3. 3 SEO is all fun and games until organic traffic takes a dive.
4. 4 Gray Dot Co Don’t panic! Pinpoint the cause. I’ll show you how to investigate, including: ➔ A trusted framework for conducting a comprehensive SEO investigation ➔ The different factors to investigate & what to look for
5. Part 1: Determine whether to investigate 5 Gray Dot Co
6. Is it a tracking issue? It might not be an SEO issue if there are… 6 Gray Dot Co BIG DATA DISCREPANCIES GSC metrics are vastly different than internal analytics. TRAFFIC LOSS ACROSS CHANNELS Signals an issue with analytics tracking code or tag manager implementation.
7. Is it a tracking issue? Real life situations we’ve seen… 7 Gray Dot Co Incorrect GDPR compliance banner implementation Site lost 95% of user data for EU countries Migration gone wrong Tracking code was removed and not caught for 30+ days Improper custom event config Poorly tagged event caused ALL traffic to look like returning traffic UTMs in the nav After a single page, every user journey was overwritten to be direct
8. Filter data & find the source. 8 Gray Dot Co ❏ Seasonality ❏ URL / Directory ❏ Query ❏ SERP feature ❏ Search type ❏ Geography ❏ Device
9. Check the impact on KPIs. 9 Gray Dot Co • The value of traffic is in conversions. • When conversions aren’t impacted, it could be okay not to take any action. • The sources of greatest conversion loss should always get attention first.
10. Is the juice worth the squeeze? 10 Gray Dot Co Take this client, organic web traffic and conversions were consistently decreasing through 2024.
11. Is the juice worth the squeeze? 11 Gray Dot Co However, once we dug in - we found that the MQLs from Organic Search were actually up - meaning we had better quality.
12. Part 2: Investigate the potential factors 12 Gray Dot Co
13. SEO factors checklist 13 Gray Dot Co ❏ Site content ❏ Technical issues ❏ Backlinks & referrers ❏ Algorithm updates ❏ SERP changes ❏ Google penalties ❏ Competition ❏ Consumer behavior INTERNAL EXTERNAL
14. Start with the trend line. 14 Gray Dot Co GRADUAL ❏ Website / content quality ❏ Domain authority ❏ Market landscape impact STEEP ❏ Major technical issues ❏ Google algorithm update ❏ Potential penalization
15. Let’s walk through an actual investigation… 15 Gray Dot Co
16. How this got started. 16 Gray Dot Co Domain migration
17. At-play factors Investigation parameters 17 Gray Dot Co Site details: • 50M+ URLs • 200+ languages • Documentation site ◦ priority metrics are related to brand recall & authority ◦ aka not the standard conversion/transaction model Top questions: • Was the CTR decline caused by a botched migration? ◦ aka is there a tech problem? • The money question: How do we get our ~14% CTR back?
18. Our first step 18 Gray Dot Co WHERE ARE THE DECLINES HAPPENING? We dug into GSC data to find patterns to isolate what sections of the site were impacted by the CTR decline. Methods to do this at scale: • Machine learning libraries that specialize in data anomaly detection ◦ Isolation forest ◦ Density-based approaches (my favorite for visuals) ◦ Gaussian mixture model
19. So what did we find? 19 Gray Dot Co • Isolated to countries where the most commonly used languages are English and Spanish • Ran clustering models on related topics, and compared to the previous domain performance Y’all, I can’t make this up…
20. 20 Gray Dot Co Thank you! LinkedIn /company/graydotco /in/samantha-torres-seo BlueSky @thegray.company @sam.thegray.co thegray.company/services/ seo-traffic-investigation