10 factors that may be impacting your organic traffic

Whether you’re a seasoned SEO or someone who runs your own business, you know there are fluctuations in your organic traffic, but you may struggle to pinpoint the root cause.

Organic search, unlike its paid counterpart, comes with a unique set of challenges in diagnosing a decline in traffic and conversions. There are some obvious places you can mine for insights (Google Analytics, Google Search Console), but other factors at play can be harder to quantify.

From basic issues to advanced issues to factors that are largely out of your control, following is a list of things to check for when diagnosing major fluctuations in organic traffic or search engine rankings. By examining both internal and external factors, you can start to piece together the puzzle.

Basic issues

1. Your pages aren’t indexed

Conduct a quick Google search using “site:yourwebsite.com” to make sure your pages are actually indexed. If you’re noticing that critical pages aren’t appearing in the SERPs, you’ve likely found the culprit. Check your robots.txt file to make sure you haven’t blocked important pages or directories. If that looks good, check individual pages for a noindex tag.

2. Bot filters

Are you currently excluding all known bots and spiders in Google Analytics? If not, you may be experiencing inflated traffic metrics and not even know it. Typically, bots enter through the home page and cascade down throughout your site navigation, mimicking real user behaviour. One telltale sign of bot traffic is a highly trafficked page with a high bounce rate, low conversions and a low average time on page.

While it’s best to create a custom dimension for filtering out bots, applying the generic bot filter is a good place to start. It’s important to note that filters cannot be applied retroactively, so if you’ve recently turned on this feature, you should be receiving less traffic. Additionally, double-check that you are filtering out your own traffic and IP address.

3. Recent site updates

If you’ve recently modified your on-page copy, undergone a site overhaul (removing pages, reordering the navigation) or migrated your site sans redirects, it’s reasonable to expect a decline in traffic. After reworking your site content, Google must re-crawl and then re-index these pages. It’s not uncommon to experience unstable rankings for up to a few weeks afterwards.

If you’ve changed your URL structure or removed pages from your site, it’s important to have a 301-redirect strategy in place to preserve link equity and avoid a loss of rankings/traffic.

4. URL confusion

Do you have a content strategy in place, or are your efforts more “off the cuff?” Not having a clearly defined keyword map can spell trouble — especially if two or more pages are optimised for the same keyword. In practice, this will cause pages to compete against each other in the SERPs, potentially reducing the rankings of these pages. Here is an example of what this might look like:

• URL 1: www.mysite.com/cakes/raspberry-chocolate-cake
• URL 2: www.mysite.com/flavors/chocolate-raspberry-cake

Fortunately, if you have access to a keyword tracking tool, you should be able to see a day-by-day breakdown of which URLs Google chooses to rank for that particular keyword. With a little time and effort, you should be able to remedy the situation.

Advanced issues

5. Structured data markup

Implementing structured data markup (such as that from schema.org) might seem like a one-time project, but that “set it and forget it” mentality can land you in hot water. You should be monitoring the appearance of your rich snippets on a regular basis to ensure they are pulling in the correct information. As you change the content on your website, this can alter the markup without warning.

Likewise, depending on your back-end merchandising setup, products could be triggered to show “out of stock” schema if one color variation goes out of stock. As you can imagine, this can wreak havoc on your click-through rates and lead users to purchase from your resellers — or worse, your competitors!

6. Promotional cadence & the “Sale Hangover Effect”

Did you run a big promotion last year, such as a sample or flash sale? Did it coincide with the same week this year? If not, your year-on-year comparison will be skewed.

If so, were your past promotions equally enticing? Did your brand launch a new product line or offer limited-time products? These factors alone are difficult to measure, and we’re not even accounting for PR efforts, which will also impact your organic metrics.

There is also significant evidence to suggest that the “Sale Hangover Effect” is not just a phenomenon. It deals with two factors: share of mind and share of wallet.

Tim Kilroy, co-founder of AdChemix, explains this anomaly:


Consumers only have so much attention and so much money — and for each, they set a “budget” for how much they want to spend with the brands that are important to them. Consumers invest their attention and money into big promotions. Typically, big promos have big results for the retailer, but the flip side is that the promo has emptied the consumers’ budget for attention and money. If the promo is big enough, it even entices some consumers to overspend a little bit (or a lot). When consumers have expended or exceeded their budget, they tend to engage with your brand less. They become immune to marketing messages and spend fewer dollars.

7. Price point & product depth

As a savvy digital marketer, you’ve inevitably nailed the four Ps: price, product, promotion and place. However, a well-planned strategy means nothing without the fifth P: people.

Here is a common narrative that many e-tailers can relate to: You identified your “sweet spot” in the marketplace and know that charging above this threshold leads to price sensitivity. Your core products drive volume — which allows you to achieve amazing growth. Then, one day, your focus shifted. Maybe you stopped churning out iterations of your best sellers, or maybe you tried to focus on your higher-revenue products — all the while alienating the people who liked your previous offerings.

This quickly turns into a “chicken-and-egg” situation. Are fewer people coming to your site due to poor visibility in the SERPs? Or have you shifted your product focus, and is that why consumers are no longer interested in your brand? For a quick check, look at Google Search Console data, and pull positions and clicks by page. If position is staying relatively stagnant, this means your brand is not losing visibility in the SERPs, and there may be a bigger issue at play.

Uncontrollable factors

8. Being outranked by re-sellers & affiliates

For maximum exposure, you may have launched an affiliate program or have several re-sellers under your belt. This is typically a non-issue — until, of course, your re-sellers start to outrank you for branded keywords. While this might not derail your revenue goals, it’s a sure bet you’re losing traffic to these sites.

9. New Google ad placement

With Google killing off right-hand rail ads, many brands may be seeing more of their direct traffic being cannibalised by paid search ads. It will be some time before we’re able to quantify the full effect, but you should be mindful of this.

10. Industry trends & waning brand interest

With the exception of crude oil and Picasso's, very few industries are “recession-proof” and experience an inelastic product demand. Look at how your competitors are faring, and see if they’re experiencing the same problems. While you should take Google Trends data with a grain of salt, looking at the bigger picture may help provide some clarity. I’d suggest taking this a step further by conducting trends research and reading industry reports.

Brands hold a wealth of customer information that may often not seem applicable to SEO — and many times, it’s not. However, if you’re working with an SEO agency, sometimes sharing this knowledge can provide the missing piece to the puzzle. Knowing something as simple as “Consumer preferences are shifting around the colour black” could help explain why your traffic is down if your products are often paired with black shoes. Sometimes it’s as easy as connecting the dots.

Take a Page From a Coach’s Playbook to Build a Winning Business Team

When it comes to managing teams, winning coaches understand that providing consistent feedback and praise to individual players contributes to the betterment of the team. Great coaches don’t just call the plays, they are tasked with motivating and aligning each player to form an athletic powerhouse.

The benefits of this approach aren’t exclusive to sports teams. Coaches and business leaders want to accomplish the same things, whether it’s with athletes or employees: to build connected and motivated teams that work together to accomplish greatness.

What Can Business Leaders Learn From Coaches?

Understanding what coaches do to build winning teams in general terms might be helpful in a theoretical sense—but what practices can business leaders adopt to make their dream team a reality? It turns out that there are a few specific things any leader can do to build a team of champions:

Engage often with meaningful feedback. Coaches don’t wait until the season is over to let their players know how they’re doing and what they need to improve on. Neither should business leaders. The annual performance review—which is often seen as a somewhat futile attempt to condense a year’s worth of work into a 30-minute recap—simply isn’t enough for telling employees what they’re doing right and what they need to work on. This time delay for giving feedback is one reason the end-of-year/quarterly performance review approach to improving performance doesn’t work for winning teams.

A leader’s greatest tool is feedback—constructive criticism and especially praise—provided in great frequency, in context, and personalised for each team member. Formal and informal meetings, emails, phone calls, and in-person remarks work together to create an engaged company culture that turns involvement into commitment.

Tip: Recognising employees at least one to three times a week is tied to significant increases in engagement, productivity, and employee retention. When you see positive behaviours, whether big or small, don’t hesitate to provide positive reinforcement in the moment. Yes, it really does matter for winning teams.

Illustrate employee impact. Coaches value each player’s contribution to a successful play or game. They don’t just praise a quarterback for a touchdown pass; they also recognise the great blocking and hot hands of the other players. In the same way, it’s imperative for you to let your employees know how their work specifically impacts the entire team, management, and the business as a whole. By doing this, you reinforce the notion that each individual fills an essential role in the company; this recognition improves the production and morale of the team, and the commitment to achieving the company’s larger mission. Studies have shown that people who feel appreciated are motivated to work harder.

Tip: When providing positive feedback, make sure employees understand how their roles affect the bigger company picture. This reinforces the message that every player counts, and each person’s role has a significant impact on the success of the team.

Make it bigger than a paycheck. Coaches reinforce pride–for the team, the location, the sport, the ownership–to remind players there is more than just money at stake. In business, employers more than ever today want to feel like the work they do is meaningful. This is why it’s important that business leaders tie the work of individuals to the story of the overall business and to the company’s place in the world. While you might wonder how to make certain jobs seem meaningful to employees, remember that the mission of most businesses is to make customers happy through innovation, growth, and service. This is a message that most employees will be proud to follow, so figure out a way to share it with them.

Tip: Make sure employees are aware of your company’s values and mission statement. When these things are operationalised within the business and culture, teams are more galvanised to a common goal or mission, and a common set of behaviours that help them to achieve this goal.

Promote connections across the business. Players don’t do their best just because they are told to. They also work hard to support their peers, to impress their coaches, and to share in the camaraderie that emerges when a team works together. They feel connected to other team members, and this sense of connection brings out loyalty, hard work, and a deep sense of commitment.

Managers should strive to create a similar sense of camaraderie by fostering community among their employees. When people feel a personal connection to their workplaces and the folks within them, they’re more likely to give their hearts and minds to their job and not just do the bare minimum of what’s expected. This loyalty translates into big ROI for your business, namely around increased retention of your star players.

Tip: Encourage peer-to-peer connections by providing opportunities for employees to interact with every employee–not just small or specific groups of close teammates. The more leaders break down barriers between departments, management, and teams, the better chance they have at building lasting connectivity.

Drawing Conclusions

Business management and coaching have a lot in common. In both fields, engagement, feedback and connectivity are key to making team members feel appreciated, informed, and committed. Anyone who wants to build and maintain a winning team, one that consistently overcomes obstacles and exceeds its goals, should remember to take some simple lessons from history’s winning coaches.

7 Innovative Ways Your Business Can Give Back

Employee volunteer days and donation-matching programs are excellent ways for businesses to give back. But companies today are exploring new ways to contribute to their communities, simultaneously stimulating employee (and customer) engagement and having a great impact overall. Here are seven ideas you can start implementing right now:

1. Gamify ‘going green.’

Composting isn’t new, and let’s be honest…not very exciting. But you know what is? Gardening, and getting outside during the work day! Helen Rogerson of Churchill Education says her team has a bucket for food scraps in the company kitchen which they empty regularly into a compost bin. They eventually use that compost to plant and grow a small herb garden on-site.

Team members are able pick out the herbs, plant them, and share the resulting produce. This is a fun and hands-on way to engage your employees and promote good environmental health throughout your business.

2. Auction off some goodies, and give away the proceeds.

Auctions are a simple way to raise money for a cause you care about, as people are more inclined to purchase products when the profits go towards a philanthropic project. This raises awareness about your company and your cause, and is a fun way to showcase your new and exciting products.

Bluethumb and Handkrafted have a great model in place for this kind of fundraising. They teamed up with local artists to auction off one-of-a-kind artwork online. This is truly win-win: the artists get exposure and the businesses get to give back.

Bonus idea: You could add some extra creative flare and turn this idea into a penny auction to maximize impact, and give more people “the gift of giving.” Bidders would commit small amounts of cash, even a few pennies, towards the item being auctioned. The highest bidder gets the prize, but all the other bidders’ contributions would still go towards a great cause.

3. Better yet, just give away your awesome [extra] products.

If your company sells a physical good, you are bound to have extra materials and old models laying around. Don’t let them go to waste! Take Orion Labs as an example: the San Francisco company now has its second generation of wearable communication devices on the market.

So what happened to the leftover first generation inventory? Operations guru Andrew Sherman saw an opportunity at a local homeless youth organisation that could put the product to good use. He provided the devices and arranged training for the nonprofit’s team so that these new electronics could improve communications within the program and help it run more seamlessly.

4. Add ‘giving’ incentives for meeting deadlines.

Whether it’s incentivizing clients, customers, or employees to hustle towards a business goal, adding in a “giving” reward is a sure way to move them to action. UK-based accounting firm Jonathan Ford & Co used this method to motivate their clientele to file their tax returns on time, by promising to sponsor one child’s malaria treatment overseas for every timely return received.

Tax season is stressful enough, so not only is this helping the kids, it’s helping the employees’ work-flow management as well.

5. Use your work space during off hours for a ‘can’t miss’ community event.

This is a good way to show your company’s commitment to the local community and become more integrated within it. You can offer a free event, like Amaze Education’s “movie night” where anyone can come and enjoy a peaceful evening catching a new flick at the company’s early education centre.

6. Or donate your space to other causes.

Nonprofits and charities are often looking for space to use for meetings, events and fundraisers… so why not let them use your empty after-hours work space to do so? You can give back simply by not letting your space go to waste!

7. Give ‘giving’ for special occasions.

Providing “giving credits” to your employees or clientele so that they can give to the causes of their choosing is a great way to celebrate achievements and milestones. Jane Burns of Lighthouse Health Group has each of her employees designate their “cause of choice” during their birthday month to which the company contributes towards. This kind of “giving gift card” could be replicated for employee (and customer) engagements, weddings, and birth announcements!

7 Face-to-Face Networking Mistakes That Could Kill Your Professional Image

Despite all the online ways to link up with potential clients, I still believe making in-person connections needs to be a part of every business owner’s networking regimen. When you’re face-to-face with people, you can form bonds more easily because they get a more complete picture of who you are through your voice, body language, and appearance.

That’s powerful and wonderful … unless you get careless.

While face-to-face networking can result in prospects gravitating to you, it also holds the potential to drive them in the opposite direction. Could your networking habits be turning off other professionals and causing you to lose out on business opportunities?

Avoid these networking no-nos:

1. Interrupting conversations. “How rude!” That’s what I think when someone walks up without apology and interrupts a conversation I’m having with another person. Although discussions won’t typically be too in-depth at networking events, it’s still in bad taste to cut off conversations between others.

2. Practising the “hard sell.” Want a surefire way to make connections eager to avoid you? Then push your products and services right from the start when meeting them. Doing so makes you appear aggressive as well as desperate—definitely not the impression you want to make!

3. Complaining. Remember, you’re there to connect with other professionals. While commenting on the venue location, décor, hors d’oeuvres, or other amenities can help ease you into a dialogue with someone, it can have a negative impact if your words are uncomplimentary. Others might perceive you as snide and ungracious.

4. Being all “me, me, me” and not taking an interest in others. Sure, you’re doing great things and everyone should know more about that. But you’ll do yourself a greater service if you forgo making yourself the centre of attention and instead listen to what others have to share about their businesses. By asking open-ended questions and turning a keen ear to their needs, you can assess whether or not they may be a viable prospect. And then later you can follow up to share more about what you can offer them.

5. Having a few too many cocktails. Woot! Yes, networking functions often come in the form of mixers with a bit of a party atmosphere. But I’ve seen otherwise polished professionals turn into hot messes because they didn’t control their alcohol consumption at events.

6. Speaking ill of someone else in the room or about your clients. No, no, no. Don’t EVER do this. You never know who knows whom. Need I say more?

7. Dressing like you don’t care. Although many networking events are relatively casual, take care not to go too far with the informality. If you’re not sure what the dress code is, I recommend erring on the side of slightly overdressed. Worst-case scenario will be that you look a tad more professional than everyone else. No one will think less of you for that.

Done with attention to making a first-rate first impression, face-to-face networking can open doors to lasting professional relationships. Put your best, most engaging you out there every time—and take care to avoid networking missteps that could turn off prospective customers.

How Publishers Created Interactive Content Around Brexit

With the uproar over last week’s EU Referendum, in which the U.K. opted to leave the European Union, lots has happened: Donald Trump released yet another controversial tweet, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron tendered his resignation, Scotland threatened to make another bid for independence and other countries have threatened to leave the EU.

Publishers worldwide have covered the topic from nearly every angle, thus creating another story in itself: Outlets rely on nontraditional formats to win the public’s attention in an overwhelming sea of information and content. There is no surprise there, considering the fact that a recent study found that interactive content formats demand more attention than non-interactive ones.

In the midst of such a controversial topic that seized worldwide attention and triggered strong emotional responses, these five publishers understood that it was necessary to speak with their readers, not at them.

Fortune asked its audience via a poll: “Should it Brexit or Bremain?” The item, published before the vote, presented a list of pre-referendum arguments and asked readers to read through, and then come to their own conclusion before casting their vote. Interestingly enough, the results differed from those of the real vote, showing that the majority of those who interacted with the poll voted to remain in the EU.



The Telegraph opted for a swiper format to gauge its audience’s take on the topic. This item made it easy for readers to cast their opinion, on which speakers performed well during BBC’s Brexit-focused debate, resulting in 184,000 views.



Lifestyle and fitness publication Men’s Health used a trivia quiz to apply a health-conscious approach to the matter. In an item asking, “Is the EU Good for Your Health?,” the editorial team successfully educated its readers about the EU’s influence on day-to-day well being concerns.

U.K. publication The Tab chose to take the humoristic route, asking their audience, “What’s Your Brexit Strategy?.” The outlet employed a personality quiz that included light-hearted questions such as, “How long would you survive in the wild?,” and results such as, “Live on a fishing boat in the North Sea.” The humour reflected the mood of the nation and impressed The Tab’s readers, garnering an 89 percent completion rate and an average of 2.5 minutes spent on page.



Last but not least, The Huffington Post employed a chat-like format to break down the untruths contained within a flyer campaigning to leave the EU. The conversation, which took a comedic approach similar to that of The Tab’s item, pinned reason and sanity against a right-wing party in the U.K. to point out the hilarity of the document.

The above showcases that pairing good content with the right medium– in this case a format–is the catalyst for compelling content readers crave. Outlets that opt to employ interactive content formats and transform their sites into platforms in which readers can voice their opinions will undoubtedly earn the vote of their audiences.