Sudden substantial drop in organic traffic

[unitednetworks]

Back in the middle of August we noticed a significant drop in organic traffic from Google for one of our clients. They had been averaging around 125 sessions per day but after that date it dropped to 50-60 per day.

Their WordPress website has been kept updated but no changes to content were applied. No significant changes occurred in the marketplace, and this is not a seasonal drop. It came several weeks before the Possum and Penguin 4.0 updates, so we ruled them out.

The only change we can confirm was that their Google My Business listing was claimed and setup on or around the day the traffic dropped off a cliff. Their listing is setup properly, as far as we can tell, and links to their website.

I can't find any indication of why this would affect traffic in such a negative way and it hasn't recovered since. It's stable now, but still half of what they had before. It's down across the board, too. Mobile, desktop, geographically, new vs returning. Everything.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

[seanginnaw]

No problem at all - glad I could help!

[unitednetworks]

Sean:
You're exactly right. I never thought of that at all, but a lot of their customers are just looking for a phone number so they wouldn't need the website once that was available on a SERP. I didn't consider it before because they had numbers in the automatically generated business listings, but I think most of those were out of date. Thanks!

[seanginnaw]

Hey Scott,

Interestingly, this is something I've faced with a client of mine recently and have gone on to write up a case study about it. My client is in the housing sector with a whole bunch of housing developments which we subsequently setup on Google My Business. Originally we thought this was a great way of increasing organic exposure and should be a doorway to more organic traffic. It was only after we implemented GMB listings for around 50-60 housing developments that we noticed organic traffic saw a sudden decrease.

This was to do with a section of the target audience no longer needing to go to the website to find out important details such as contact information (phone numbers & email addresses) as well as navigational details (postcodes and addresses) as these were now obtainable through search results and maps results. Fundamentally we were making the user journey more streamlined as there were less clicks needed to get to vital information and users could now Sat Nav their journey at the click of a button, BUT it did mean they were no longer visitors to the main client site.

My advice would be to check the date that you launched GMB and have a look at a cross section of 'organic traffic' and 'organic conversion rate' OR 'organic traffic' and 'organic bounce rate' (if you have no conversions set up) to see if you see a sudden increase in conversion rates (as less 'low quality' traffic is visiting the site) or a sudden decrease in bounce rates (due to users only visiting one page to find out contact/location information).

I would bet my bottom dollar that you're facing a similar situation.

Hope this helps,

Sean