Drop In Branded Traffic
-
Hi,
We took on a new client in March. Over the last few months I have noticed that their Branded Organic Traffic has dropped off considerably, around 20%. On further investigation I discovered that the drop off occurred between Jan & Feb this year (prior to us taking over). In Jan they launched a new site, the drop off seems to coincide with the launch of their new website. I also found out that their Page Rank had disappeared before the launch of the new website, and is still a PR/na.
My first thought was that they have been penalised. How likely is this on a very well known site which gets roughly 170K visits per month? Could the drop in Branded Traffic be due to a decrease in advertising budget elsewhere (to compensate for the cost of the new website, leading to less brand exposure)? Could it be that there are just fewer people searching for their Brand?
I guess the questions I am trying to find out are:
1. What are the reasons for massive drops in Branded organic traffic?
2. As an seo I am tasked mainly for optimising for non-branded organic traffic, is there anything I can suggest to the client to help get this traffic back?
3. If it is an algorithmic penalty (Panda, Penguin), how do I know which one? I have started with their links and disavowed known toxic links, fixed crawl errors, optimised their top pages etc etc. If it was a penalty and I mange to fix it, will their branded traffic return?
Any help with the above would be greatly appreciated.
Jon
-
PR and SEO do go hand in hand though, if they have an external/internal PR agency then use the coverage they provide and use it contact bloggers, put it on social media websites etc. It's something I do for our clients and works quite well. Use various branded links in the content and push that out to websites/bloggers that will help influence customers.
-
Thanks Karl,
I have been tasked with increasing overall traffic to bring this all back in line. The PR clearly lies with the client, we look after their search results (PPC & SEO). Is there anything from an SEO perspective I can do for their Branded Traffic? I am jsut conscious that the goals posts between branded and non-branded organic visits have moved considerably and I would need to get a lot more non branded organic visits to make up for the loss in brand visits? Almost too many;-)
-
Was there something on the website that was omitted in the new design? A tool/ news story etc. Maybe they were doing a lot more PR than they are now so it has resulted in less branded traffic. It does sound very strange but doesn't sound like it is a penalty because you would have lost your rankings which hasn't happened.
-
Hi Karl,
No loss in rankings for branded terms, just a lot less traffic year on year. I just found it so strange that after their site went live there branded search dropped from 67K to 49K in one month. I will do a lot more analysis around the (not provided), but I can't see how that would just happen in a month (over time perhaps).
-
Have you lost rankings for branded terms as well? If so then it's almost definitely a penalty. The drop in PR to n/a is very strange but I'd be more worried if the branded terms have gone. What are the rankings looking like at the moment? Any huge drops?
-
Hi,
Yes they are still ranking 1 for all their brand terms and I have been making sure all their title tags and meta data is properly optimised for their brand. Super baffled on this as non branded organic is fine;-)
-
Hey Karl,
Yes definitely looked at year on year and so far 20% down on all branded search queries (also checked queries in WMT over the last 3month). Only reason I thought it may be a penalty was this article and the fact that their Page Rank went to PR/na (does this happen randomly)?
"For algorithmic penalties, here are some sure-fire clues.
- Your website is not ranking well for your brand name any more. That’s a dead giveaway. Even if your site doesn’t rank for much else, it should at least do well on that one keyword.
- Any page one positions you had are slipping back to page two or three without any action on your part.
- PageRank for your site has inexplicably dropped from a respectable two or three to a big fat zero (or a measly PR of one)."
-
Hi Spyder Trap,
(not provided) has been steadily increasing over the past few months but not to warrant such a large a drop. This drop was literally after the site went live in January, Searches for the brand name were down 20% on last year month on month, the queries are slightly seasonal (also looked at last year).
Will keep digging but I don't think it's the "not provided" - even though that is a pain;-)
Could some of it be in Direct Traffic??
-
I have to agree with SpyderTrap here. Compare year over year, most of the times it is seasonality. So you want to make sure you are comparing apple with apple. For some of my e-commerce clients for example there branded traffic keeps getting higher and higher in October, november, december and then it gets very low. So depending on your products or services it might affect your branded traffic.
Make sure the website is still optimize for there brand names. Some clients during redesign forget that they are not the only one competing for there brand name and you can only see there brand in the domain name. Is your client ranking #1 for all of there brand terms? Is there new competition for there brand name.
I hope it helps cheers!
-
Hi Jon,
What are the stats like year-on-year, are they ~20% down as well. If it coincided with the launch of the new website maybe it is worth asking them if they utilised all the correct redirects, if they didn't and Google is still trying to reach the new website and the old links point to the older domain then this could have an adverse effect.
It doesn't seem like a penalty to me because if it was then all your keywords would have reduced, not just the branded traffic. If they are a well known company, why not look at doing more PR, look at driving traffic that way.
-
-
Was there an increase in "not provided" that would justify the drop in branded traffic? That can happen.
-
First, isolate the cause. Did you check seasonality as well? Is this a pattern or can it be attributed to more data gobbled up by not provided?
-
I would doubt any penalty would result in decreased rankings over branded queries only. If your non-branded traffic was still solid, I would keep digging in Analytics for the answer, unless the brand name is exact match for the query..
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Re-Branding Website
Hi everyone! I'm currently in the process of re-branding a website, and am really worried about the SEO consequences of doing so... The site I'm working on has recently been seeing a large increase of organic search traffic (almost 25% each month for the past 3 months) and I want to do my best to avoid screwing that up in the process of changing the aesthetic of the site. A couple specific questions I have are: Does changing the stylesheet, but none of the on-page content affect SEO? Would condensing menu items (i.e. putting all services under 1 item named "services") have a positive or negative effect? Neither? Any advice, tips, or previous experiences on this would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Branding | | Derrald0 -
My 40 year old, well established business has a brand name that I think is hurting my SEO. Need advice please.
Our business brand name has words in it which when we were using it as our domain name, was a) bad for our SEO and b) got our emails marked as spam in our client's inboxes. This was not a problem when we first got online, years ago. It eventually became problematic, but we didn't realize it for some time. When we realized the issue, we simply changed our domain name to something more SEO friendly, using exact match keywords. This was fine for a while, but eventually, algorithms changed again, and now with Google putting an emphasis on Brand Names and not looking as kindly on exact match keyword type domains, we are again at a place where we don't know what to do. We can't change our brand name. I don't want to post our real name or business here, but I will give an example. Brand Name: Living Free Travel The Issue: "Free Travel" gets blocked by spam filters, gets us useless traffic from people looking for free travel (which makes out bounce rates very high), gets our domain blacklisted. The Solution: travel2europe.com is the website of Living Free Travel The New Issue: travel2europe.com is not our brand, and probably doesn't look like one to Google, especially since on our site, travel2europe.com is never really mentioned because it is only our domain, not our brand. "Living Free Travel" is generally the anchor text for travel2europe.com wherever we are linked to. We assume this mismatch is problematic for us in ways we don't even know. Are we screwed? Need advice, please. THANK YOU.
Branding | | benenjerry0 -
What is your thoughts on the proper way for one brand to promote a sub-brand.
Greetings fellow Mozers! How Do Major Companies Promote Their New Sub-Brands I'm curious to see everyone's thoughts on how and what is the best process to promoting your companies new brand. I see companies like Wayfair.com promoting their sub-brand "All Modern" and "Wayfair supply" (maybe "sub-brand" isn't the best term) in the top left of the page as a link. I believe this is only a SEO play because they are only outbound links to the brand website. If you go to "All Modern" there are no links back to Wayfair. I then looked at a company like Gap.com and notice that all of their other brands are promoted on the website and are also interchangeably linked to one another. Does anyone have any thoughts on the best way to link and or promote your smaller brand that could potentially turn it into a Major Brand. Do you think this is just a SEO linking play. I'm curious to see everyone's thoughts
Branding | | rpaiva0 -
How to market a brand when the brand name is constantly changing?
I work in an industry where companies are often being bought up by other larger companies. When this happens, there is often a change in the company name to incorporate the parent company name as well. My company is a distributor of these products and I'm wondering if there are best practices for marketing both the original brand name and the new brand name for the same product? We're trying to avoid any duplicate product detail pages, so dynamically generating the same page for two different names is not ideal. Anyone have any tips? Thanks!
Branding | | GalcoIndustrial0 -
How to rank #1 for brand name when its 2 competitive keywords?
Hi Mozzers, I have recently began the SEO on a website which is a few years old, with little SEO done beforehand.
Branding | | Silkstream
I really want to get this domain ranking #1 for its brand name, however the brand name also happens to be a combination of two highly competitive keywords - one of them being "hire". I have done everything I can think of as a recommended step to signal Google, but it still sits between position #20 and position #15 (on a good day). So far I have:
Set up G+
Linked the website
Added Rel=publisher
Submitted site to Yell.com and a couple of other business directories
Added branded links from every the bio of each article on the blog pointing to the homepage.
Built a handful of branded links from related niche websites.
Set up social pages. Question:
What else can I do to improve on its position in the SERPS? More info:
The site ranks number 2 in Bing for the brand name. The domain is an exact match of two keywords without a hyphen between them - the site ranks position #1 for that search on Google. Question:
Would a hyphenated domain make any difference at all? Thanks everyone!0 -
Google + Brand Page for Multiple Locations
We have had our Google Places pages up and running now for a bit, and we are looking to start our Google + Brand page. What is the best way to handle a Brand page with multiple locations? Create a page for each location so we can connect them to their Places equivalent? Create one overall brand page and not connect it to the Google Places? A lot of the information I am seeing is around a year out of date with Google saying "something is coming" but no updates since then, so how have others in similar situations handled it?
Branding | | BeOnAir0 -
Need advice on old brand names
A couple of years ago my company put all effort into one brand name, closing multiple sites with good names. All traffic going to ie OldBrandName.com is now redirected to www.newbrandname.com/OldBrandName. Here our customers are being told about the fusion/merge and we are linking to the key-products of OldBrandName, on our new age. We have 4 of these pages for 4 different brandnames. These pages still get a lot of traffic. Now to my question: how do I get as much juice as possible out of these OldBrandNames? They have high page authority and many inbound links. But I would like to pass the juice and the links to our frontpage or other relevant pages. What is optimal? Should I just redirect all the traffic to www.newbrandname.com? The redirects was made approximately 2 years ago. We are in the travel & leisure business, so customers often visits numerous times a year, closing deals 1-2 times a year. All 4 OldBrandNames have their own specialities (family, low budget, off-the-beaten-track, wellness). Any recommendations on how to approach this?
Branding | | alsvik0 -
Should I create a Google + account for the brand for Rel=Author
Hi, What I meant is should I use the above mentioned account as rel=author for category pages etc? It seems to me improper to use my account (with my picture) in a category page and to show my face in the SERPS for searches like "Toshiba Laptops". On the other hand, if in the SERPS it will show our Logo it might increase CTR... Any thoughts? Thanks
Branding | | BeytzNet0