In the practice of an SEO specialist, often analyzing the decline in organic traffic turns into a complex task that requires quick and accurate solutions. The reasons for the decrease can differ, and there is often not enough time to find them.
When I came across Aleyda Solis’ article “7 Key Questions and Tools to Assess Your Site Organic Search Rankings Drops“, it immediately caught my attention. Aleyda brought up a really important topic that requires careful attention in SEO. Although the article has been out for quite a while, it remains relevant, offering tips and tools that help you look at traffic analysis from new perspectives.
In this piece, I will discuss these seven questions, share my observations from practice, and present my approach to traffic analysis. I hope this material will be useful and help you quickly find insights where you least expect them, without extra effort.
- Aleyda’s seven key questions from the article
- Not all declines are the same – diagnosing problems with organic traffic
- Why is organic traffic analysis often overlooked?
- My case: What SEO traffic analytics means to me
- Google Search Console’s role in analytics
- A fresh take on analyzing organic traffic with GSC data
- What’s next? A new look at traffic monitoring in Google Search Console
Aleyda’s seven key questions from the article
- Is the drop in organic traffic related to Google Search updates or significant content changes?
This question helps you determine if Google’s algorithmic changes or your updates have caused a drop in visibility. - Which queries and pages decreased (as well as increased) the most?
Segmenting your traffic by query and page lets you see specific drop and growth points. - Are decreases or increases in traffic related to changes in positions or impressions and/or CTR?
It allows you to understand what exactly influenced the decline: falling positions, decreased clickability, or decreased visibility of queries. - Did the drop in traffic happen due to decreased visibility in SERPs?
Loss of visibility in search engine functionality blocks, such as snippets or carousels, can cause a dramatic drop in traffic. - Which competitors’ pages have risen in the rankings while yours have declined?
This question leads to analyzing the competitors who beat you in the search engine rankings. - Which competitors’ pages are getting more visibility for the query group where your pages have lost ranking?
Identifying key competitors in segments where you have lost ground helps you understand their strategy. - Which competitors’ pages are getting the most clicks for queries where your pages have declined?
Analyzing pages that have driven traffic helps you understand where you are losing ground.
These questions provide a clear structure for analysis. Aleyda’s article provides a comprehensive view of the problem, and I recommend reading it for even more useful details.
Not all declines are the same – diagnosing problems with organic traffic
A drop in traffic is always an alarming signal, but its nature and magnitude can differ. Before looking for causes, it’s essential to qualify the drop type to make the correct hypotheses. Here are a few basic scenarios:
- Overall smooth fall. For example, when traffic gradually decreases over months.
- Overall sharp drop. A situation where traffic drops dramatically, often due to algorithm updates or technical errors.
- A point drop against a background of general growth or stagnation. The loss of positions on individual pages or queries often causes it.
- Hidden Fall. A rise in branded, untargeted, or bot traffic masks a decrease.
- Traffic Redistribution. For example, users move to other channels or resources.
- Falling because of declining demand or outdated semantics. Requests are losing relevance, and new demand has not yet formed.
This is far from a complete list. There can be many causes of falls. But to find them, it is important to qualify the area and scale of the problem correctly. Only this allows us to make correct hypotheses and accurate conclusions.
That’s why traffic analytics is essential and will remain an integral part of SEO.
Why is organic traffic analysis often overlooked?
Despite the importance of traffic analysis, it is often overlooked. Why? Here are the main reasons:
- Unpredictable results. Analytics is always a search with an unknown outcome. You may not know if you will find something, how long it will take, or how useful the result will be. Predicting time and resource costs is difficult for those who work by the hour. Sometimes, a couple of hours are not enough; sometimes, you need a whole day or even a few days to identify patterns. It becomes a luxury, especially with limited resources.
- Working overtime and personal time. Responsible professionals often work during personal time to finish what they couldn’t during the day. While this helps achieve results, it can lead to burnout, personal conflicts, and the need to find ways to save time in the long run.
- Unprofitability. Freelancers often face challenges managing their time, especially when they spend more on analytics than their project fees justify. It creates a dilemma with a few options: raise their prices, outsource analytics to cheaper specialists (risking quality), or, in extreme cases, leave freelancing or consulting altogether. Obviously, some manage to set clear timelines and prices upfront, but this is rare due to fixed company budgets. Declining projects is an option but risks unpaid work and reputational harm, making it a persistent challenge.
- Technical difficulties. The sheer amount of data can be overwhelming on large projects, pushing SEO specialists to learn programming (like Python), work with databases and connectors, and handle complex integrations. Yet, they’re hired for SEO, not SQL, making these extra efforts feel unnecessary. While SEO analysts handle this in some companies, what about everyone else?
- Not knowing what to look for. Often, when a new SEO specialist takes over an older site that may have been neglected, they find it challenging to pinpoint growth opportunities. As they go through the checklist, the number of issues to address can feel overwhelming, preventing further analysis from progressing.
- Sales challenges. If analytics is needed for a commercial proposal, it may be cut because of the risk that the project will not be sold. This leads to plans based on fundamental metrics, which do not take into account important details.
- Conflict of business expectations. Analytics may seem unnecessary for business: it takes time, and the results are unpredictable. It can be challenging to explain why it is worth investing in analytics in terms of money and benefits.
It is only a review of the key issues I have observed in my practice and that of my colleagues. There are too many factors that influence whether analytics becomes a priority for a professional.
My case: What SEO traffic analytics means to me
A few years ago, when I managed SEO production, sales, and training at a large agency, my job combined the roles of entrepreneur, analyst, SEO specialist, salesperson, and mentor.
Traffic analytics was an integral part of each of these areas. The projects we worked on were mostly complex and large-scale, so best practices and checklists were not enough.
Each recommendation was written manually: it included not only the terms of reference but also analytical data, hypothesis, and projected results in figures. Any changes were agreed upon by product teams, defended in front of clients, and included in the developers’ plans only if there was a justified benefit.
On the one hand, clients demanded error-free work and tangible results. On the other hand, all of this had to bring income to cover the costs of maintaining a team of 17 SEO specialists while also ensuring profit for the company. Finding a balance between these tasks was not easy.
Even at the sales stage, in-depth traffic analysis was necessary to determine the best option:
- how quickly the site could bring results,
- what kind of results can be expected after a while, given the current indicators,
- what changes would be required,
- how it would fit in with the client’s real possibilities.
It was not just an SEO check but an in-depth SEO analysis with elements of strategic planning even before the contract was awarded.
At some point, the analytics I loved became a complex, energy-consuming process and a headache. The team had to work cohesively and understand what to do, even without my constant supervision and immersion, as I couldn’t be a task manager or supervisor for everyone.
Then I started spending more time optimizing time and resources, improving the self-sufficiency of SEO specialists, and looking for ways that would allow:
- Make traffic analytics more predictable in terms of results.
- Make sure that the resources the team spends on it pay off.
- Make it easy to onboard new specialists quickly and efficiently so they can deliver more results and make fewer mistakes.
- Free up more experienced employees from routine tasks that can be automated to reduce the cost of work on projects.
My approaches and solutions have been successful: I have maintained and developed all areas for several years. Over time, my focus has gradually shifted to developing tools to help other SEO specialists like me and my team cope with similar challenges. When I joined the Buddler team, I saw an opportunity to bring my experience and ideas to the product. Today, Buddler helps SEO professionals find personalized growth points faster, streamline organic traffic analytics processes, and focus on what gets results.
Google Search Console’s role in traffic analysis
In her article, Aleyda mentions Google Search Console (GSC) as one of the key tools for analyzing traffic drops. I completely agree: GSC is a fundamental data source for an SEO specialist, essential for nearly any kind of analysis.
It’s the starting point for traffic analysis; without it, it’s hard to create accurate hypotheses. However, while GSC is valuable, manually working with large amounts of data can be difficult and time-consuming, especially if you need to identify patterns quickly or find growth points.
That’s why I decided the best solution was to start with GSC and create a traffic audit in Buddler that helps SEOs analyze data from the tool effectively.
Feel free to email me at Liz@buddler.com about any challenges you face with GSC or its data analysis. I might be able to help or even suggest a solution for development. We’re always open to feedback, ideas, and collaboration!
A fresh take on analyzing organic traffic with GSC data
When we developed Buddler, we aimed to create solutions that personally identify growth opportunities and non-obvious problem areas for each site rather than just displaying some data like many other tools or parsers.
Buddler is based on the idea of SEO Growth Hacking—an approach for those constantly looking for new ways to grow, not limiting themselves to best practices and striving to take a broader look at websites’ possibilities. This approach helps find quick and effective ways to increase traffic, which harmonizes with implementing global plans and strategies.
Buddler’s flagship product is ‘SEO Analytics Reports‘ – an audit of organic traffic based on Google Search Console data. For the convenience of users, the audit is divided into three independent reports:
- Traffic Attrition Report: If you’re noticing a downward trend in traffic or suspect one is one but don’t understand where it’s happening, this report will help you identify your site’s ‘dark areas.’ Analyzing current performance against past months’ results is a quick and easy solution. It allows you to detect pinpoint or global query drops based on position changes and highlight places to look at to recover lost traffic.
- Easy-to-Rank Keywords Report: When time is short and you need results quickly, this report will help you find the queries that can give you a quick and noticeable increase in traffic. It will show you promising keywords that are not yet in your content but are showing up on Google, from which you can target and work with minimal effort to achieve results.
- SEO CTR Benchmarks Report: If you want to understand where your queries are losing performance without significant position changes, this report will help you identify weaknesses. It compares current clickability with past trends, analyses CTR anomalies, and uncovers problematic queries and ‘hidden gems.’ This report will highlight those queries suitable for restoring lost efficiency or becoming new growth points.
You can run the audit for all countries at once or for each country individually to get a local traffic analysis. Each run is free, and after collecting and processing historical data from the GSC, you’ll see a preview of the analysis. It will show how much traffic you are losing within each analysis (report) and overall—globally or in a specific region—compared to the last 30 days. It will also display the number of requests remaining in each report after sifting through the data.
To launch, you need only register, connect the right account with access to Google Search Console, select a site under ‘SEO Analytics Reports,’ and launch by country or total.
You’ll have to wait a little while as there can be a lot of data. The audit analyses each query for the last 16 months, their monthly performance, and content from the most relevant pages participating in Google ranking. You will be notified when the audit is ready in your email and the interface.
You may get hundreds or thousands of queries worth paying attention to in just a couple of clicks, or you may not get a lot of insight, but then you’ll have peace of mind that you’re not missing anything important. It’s great, isn’t it:)
It’s also great that you can run unlimited audits as long as the data is sufficient for the audit to start and doesn’t exceed the upper analysis limit. Credits are only charged for the audit results you’re interested in, and previews are free. If the data volume is too high, using something other than GSC is better.
Bonus for Aleyda Solis subscribers
For Aleyda readers, we have prepared a special AleydaSolis20% coupon code that grants you 20% bonus credits when manually entered in the plan activation field after purchasing any paid plan on Buddler. This offer is available until March 1, 2025. Experience how convenient and efficient it is to work with a tool that allows you to look at organic traffic analysis and GSC data differently.
What’s next? A new look at traffic monitoring in Google Search Console
We at Buddler will soon launch organic traffic monitoring based on GSC data, a tool allowing you to take a new look at your sites’ traffic. It will simplify the way you work with your data and provide advanced analysis capabilities such as:
- Saving and comparing two or even three segments to each other.
- Determining what percentage of data your traffic analytics are based on.
And much more to help you keep your finger on the pulse, not miss significant changes, and stay one step ahead of your competitors.
If you want to get the most out of your Google Search Console data, try Buddler for free.
Thanks to Aleyda Solis
Aleyda, thank you for your article, which reminds us all that SEO is not only about optimization but also about the ability to analyze and adapt. I enjoy sharing your insights with our audience and seeing that our approaches are similar.
I hope readers enjoy Buddler, and there will be more free from SEOFOMO SEOs in the world.
🔥 A big hello from the entire Buddler team! ❤️
Relevant articles:
- Key Questions and Tools to Assess Your Site Organic Search Rankings Drops by Aleyda Solis
- Debugging drops in Google Search traffic by Google Search Central
- Organic Traffic Down? Don’t Panic! Here’s How to Find & Diagnose the Real Issue by Tory Grey