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How To Project Organic Search
Traffic And The Cost Of Acquiring It
Today I rolled up my sleeves and made a spreadsheet. I know, I know, try to contain your jealousy.
But in all seriousness, it was an interesting exercise. A client of ours was interested in assessing the relative cost of a few scenarios. Specifically, they
wanted to know the cost of the following:
Sustaining the traffic with periodic new content and content refreshes
Increasing the traffic by 50% over one to two years.
Increasing traffic by 100% over the same period.
Never one to back away from a Fermi problem, I figured I’d extend our modeling library to cover this scenario. If nothing else, it’d be good practice for a future hypothetical job interview to show some too-clever-by-far interviewer “how I think.” I kid if an interviewer ever asked how I think, I’d show them a gif of a hamster running on a wheel.
Anyway, I now have this utility in hand, so I thought it might be interesting to share. I’ll go through the thinking and the methodology here, and I’ll link to a Google sheet that you’re welcome to use for your own modeling. And incidentally, the numbers that I’m using in this post are made up and not related to the client that asked for this (or any other specific client)
Organic Modeling In Concept
Let me first explain the idea here at a somewhat foundational level for starters. Here are some basic principles to understand.
1. Search traffic to your site is not more than the sum of its parts. It’s a collection of URLs, each of which earn some amount of monthly traffic, and the sum of the traffic to those URLs is the total traffic to your site.
2. When you publish a piece of content to a URL, it has an organic traffic lifecycle. It will earn zero traffic for a period of time before it starts to hit page one and earn traffic. It will typically ascend for some period of time, peak, and then slowly decay.
3. Your site’s traffic will, holistically, decay by some percent over time.
4. It is generally easier (and more cost effective) to sustain traffic, but significant growth requires new content.
So the task with modeling here is twofold. First, we need to reason about existing traffic and its rate of decay. And secondly, we need to combine that with the rate of growth associated with net new content over a period of time.
Defining Our Variables
A trick I picked up during my management consulting days was to make all of your assumptions in a model big and visible by using them as variables that the stakeholders could play with So, for instance, if I don’t know what kind of conversion rate a client’s website has, holistically, I assume it’s 1%, but I make conversion rate a variable in the model
The idea is that you don’t want to make the discussion about your assumptions but rather about their insights and modeling preferences If I make 1% a variable, then if a client says, “One percent? That’s ridiculous. Why would you think that?!” I can respond with, “I didn’t It’s a wild guess Let’s change it to whatever you prefer.”
With this in mind, here are the assumption-variables for modeling a client’s organic traffic.
1. Starting traffic is crucial to understand and easy to measure with analytics. For the sake of round numbers, the example I’m using here is half a million per month.
2. Average peak traffic is how many visitors we can expect per month per piece of content. If you have a decent amount of traffic already, just take the top N articles and average them as a starting point. Absent that, guess, since we can feed field data back into the model later.
3. The rate of decay is how much traffic the site will lose per month if you do nothing. Decay tends to increase substantially as a function of how much traffic the blog has. (One thing to note here is that my initial decay model is somewhat unsophisticated as simple exponential decay, where the slope of decay should probably vary with original size.)
4. “Months to rank” is our variable for how long before the average article ranks in a position to earn traffic. Again, this initial model is (over) simple in that there should be a gradual run up from zero to peak traffic instead of the binary that I’ve started with. That said, playing with months to rank gives you proxy control over things like domain authority, keyword stats, etc.
5. Unit cost is what you’ll spend per piece of content.
6 Lead qualification is how many of these visitors become identifiable, qualified marketing leads.
All of this as input, along with the content production volume, allows us to play with figures to model out different traffic situations.
Modeling The Traffic And Cost
Here’s the rest of the worksheet, with a content publication plan aimed at a 50% growth figure within two years.
I won’t go into the actual formulas since you can get into those weeds all on your own with the sheet I’ll link below. But a few things to note here:
1. Everything in purple is an input, which you can play with.
2. If you want more than two years worth of data, you can just drag everything down.
3. You can see the earned traffic decaying month over month by the 10% we’ve scoped out in the assumptions panel. (This is a very high rate of decay)
4. Likewise, you can see the growth of net new traffic, with the three-month delay in rank being obvious.
5. The total traffic is the combination of new traffic and non-decayed traffic earned from historical content.
6. All of the customer-acquisition-cost-related data stems from the unit cost of these pieces of content.
For getting this hypothetical website from 500K to 750K visitors, I just kind of played with a front-loaded approach with roundish numbers until that final total hit the goal. This is the most common approach with any of our models when someone asks, “What would it take to get to X?” But you could just as easily pick a unit cost and plug in what a budget allows and see how much traffic you can make happen.
A Second Scenario
To get a feel for how you can play with something like this, let’s imagine that this hypothetical site owner wanted to change the inputs. “Woah, I bet we can get away with $400 per article if we run a Digital Ocean type of program, and I bet we can get our decay rate down with some cost-effective refreshes. Could we get to a million visitors with a similar budget?” (I plan to add refreshes to the modeling later)
Okay, fair enough. Let’s look at that.
Good news, hypothetical site owner! Bring your decay down to 5% and your unit cost down to $400, and not only can you hit one million visitors per month for WAY under the previous outlay of $355K, but you can move up your timeline by a year.
Of course, this doesn’t address other program-related questions, such as whether you’re even able to ramp up to seventy articles per month or whether having a spiky budget is doable. But that’s the point of the modeling tool. You can fix the things in place that you can’t control, play with the rest, and see what’s possible.
Using This Tool
That actually makes a good segue into how I’d like to conclude here: suggestions on how to use this
If you have a particular BHAG or KPI around traffic or conversions, you can start with that and work backward to a fulfillment schedule, acceptable cost, and operational goals around decay and peak traffic. But that’s not what I’d suggest for the average person using this.
Instead, I’d plug in as many actuals as possible (how much traffic do you have, how many visitors does the average top content peak at, how many articles are you actually producing, how much are you actually decaying), and see what the model projects for you in the coming years. If the traffic and CAC figures that result look good to you, great!
If not, then start playing. Could you nose up peak monthly visits? Ratchet down decay rate? Source a few more articles? Expand the budget? What kind of impact might each of these things have?
In the end, I think this can be a helpful tool around budget time for a lot of folks. You can use it to make the case that the funnel metrics the leadership team wants are way out of whack with budget, or more optimistically, that you’re actually on track with your goals and that folks need to have patience.
But the most important thing of all is that you need to feed measured data back into the model as you go. The model is only as good as its assumptions, and you can steadily improve those.
Hopefully this helps. Here’s a link to the sheet, which you can copy and feel free to use.
Interested In More Content Like
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I’m Erik, and I approved this rant…which was easy to do since I wrote it. If you happened to enjoy this, I’ve recently created a Substack where I curate all of the marketing related content I create on different sites.
Totally free, permanently non-monetized, and you’re welcome to sign up.
How We MVP Organic Traffic As A Lead Gen Channel
Minimum viable product (MVP), as defined by Eric Ries in the Lean Startup, is a fascinating term. It has a specific meaning in the context that he defined it, but it also has a highly-inferable, slightly-wrong meaning if you simply happen to know what each of those three words mean. I imagine a whole lot of people have inferred the definition without reading the book:
A minimum viable product is the earliest, feature-poorest version of your product that can survive in the market, right? Right!?
Turns out, not exactly. According to the source:
The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
I’ve always thought of the Lean Startup as a book about applying the scientific method to business. And so I’ve thought of an MVP as an experiment rather than a product, myself. How can you form and then verify or disprove a hypothesis as quickly and cost-effectively as possible? This is the core question of the MVP.
(As an aside, if legibility and lifecycle of buzzwords is a topic that interests you, I once spent a whole blog post musing about this.)
Against this backdrop, I’d like to formalize an offering we’ve been doing more frequently of late: our organic traffic MVP.
What Is An Organic Traffic
MVP?
Our organic traffic MVP is an offering designed to let you learn, as quickly and inexpensively as possible, whether organic traffic can serve as a viable lead gen channel for your business. We work with you to build a small but statistically significant stream of well-qualified traffic to your site and see if you can do something productive with that traffic.
So how is this the least effort? Couldn’t you run paid ads or look at a competitor or something? The short answer is no, you won’t learn what you need to, and I’ll explain in more detail shortly.
And how is this the maximum learning? Wouldn’t you learn more with something more precise than “do something productive with the traffic?”
The answer in this case is that you might, but it would veer out of the realm of learning about the channel. Organic traffic to your site is really just a distribution channel. So, the true-north question is whether it can get the right people onto your site and provide you a means of continuing to communicate with them.
The organic traffic MVP is thus Hit Subscribe working with you to produce a small amount of traffic-attracting content, retrospecting with you on the results, and then recommending whether or not to use search traffic as a channel in your marketing efforts.
Organic Traffic MVP Specifics: Cost, Time, And Deliverables
Given that I’m both a longtime consultant and a brevity-resistant writer, you probably assumed I’d hand-wave at the specifics and urge you to book a call to discuss. But what are we even doing if we can’t have a little fun subverting expectations from time to time?
First of all, this will cost around $10,000, in some combination of capital and your own labor. And that variability will depend mainly on who you prefer to execute the content.
Speaking of executing the content, the main deliverable will be ten pieces of content that, properly executed, project to rank and earn qualified traffic. Now, obviously that includes supporting deliverables such as our traffic modeling, keyword research, briefing, etc. But at the end of the day, you’ll publish ten pieces of content and observe the results.
Why ten? Any fewer than that, and you risk not having enough data for a proper evaluation. Too many more than that, and you’re starting to scale before you learn.
And, finally, timeline. How much calendar time should this take? The answer depends on both your timeliness on deliverables and your site’s domain authority, but you should think in terms of three to four months, on average.
So, spend $10K over three to four months, and your absolute worst case will be that you feel good disqualifying a lead gen channel and focusing on something else. A much more likely case is that you have a prototype and blueprint for scaling lead gen.
What We Want To Confirm
Now, let’s get into the meat of why you should prototype/MVP the channel rather than just pencil it in as a distribution tactic Here are the things that we want to learn about you in order to recommend hitting the gas, tuning, or abandoning the channel
Will your editorial vision and ideation tactics for site content prove a blocker for results?
Will or can you remove blockers to the channel’s success?
Will your business sustain interest and follow through?
Will the live content hit leading indicators of success in a timely fashion and drive qualified traffic?
Can you do something productive with the resultant traffic?
Throughout the course of (on average) three to four months, we’ll answer these questions together. And the ongoing learning will feed into a paradigm that I think of as “succeed, fail, tune, or bail” to help answer whether to scale the channel, abandon it, or make adjustments and continue learning.
And I should also clarify that abandoning a channel isn’t a “fail” in the judgment sense but rather in the positive, “fail fast” sense. If search engine traffic isn’t a fit
for your business, it’s better to learn that quickly and move on, rather than hiring an endless series of low-value SEO consultants to tell you to optimize meta descriptions or whatever.
What You’ll Learn
So let’s dive into the learning But to set the stage, it’s important to understand that the SEO industry has created an absolute miasma of misunderstanding of the channel among non-SEO folks In other words, the majority of people that come to us subtly misunderstand how organic traffic to their site works.
The most common, and often deal-breaking, type of misunderstanding we see is the idea that you create the content you feel like writing and then “do SEO to it with Yoast or whatever” to make it rank If this is how you think of SEO, there is a strong chance you’re going to fail at the channel. Full stop.
If this is the case, I invite to you to reference my “Are you sure you want organic traffic?” checklist to help you set more realistic expectations around the process And, yeah, as you are no doubt realizing, this comes up A LOT
When asked, everyone says they want search engine traffic. Who wouldn’t? But it isn’t until ideating topics and publishing posts that we really see if they mean it, so to speak.
1. Will Your Editorial Vision And Ideation Tactics
Prove A Blocker?
This actually makes for a great segue into describing the first thing that we want to learn about you. If you’re currently on team “sprinkle some Yoast on my thought leadership” you’re starting out in a success deficit.
Most people tend to think, understandably, of their blog in the original web-log sense The blog is your brand’s journal, where you share insights, wisdom, and novel premises, and you build an audience of steady readers. (Careful here, though, since that can easily degrade into performative content.)
So naturally, you want to ideate about interesting topics that showcase your sophistication. But the problem is this: it’s the polar opposite of how you attract search engine traffic.
Searchers are asking fairly mundane, straightforward questions when they take to Google. What does DevOps mean? Or how do I get started with Terraform?
And this means that to rank for “DevOps” and “Terraform tutorial,” you have to create content with titles like, “What is DevOps,” and, “A Terraform Tutorial for Beginners.” Enter: the friction. It’s extremely common for marketers and founders to balk at those premises as “too basic.”
So let’s get this out of the way first and foremost. If that’s your take, and you’re not moving from it, I can save you the $10K. Don’t do organic as a channel you’ll fail.
The good news is that you can have your cake and eat it too. Save your blog for thought leadership takes, and position this content as a glossary or a community tutorial repository or something. Heck, spin up a microsite.
But the first piece of learning here is whether, where, and how you can make peace with organic topics.
2. Will Or Can You Remove Blockers
To The Channel’s Success?
Next up is a much more mundane but equally important concern. Just as SEO has an editorial component, it also has a technical component.
I won’t bore you with too many details here (and rest assured, they are indeed boring). But the gist is that we have prospects that come to us with technical problems that would prove a serious headwind for the channel’s success. Some quick examples to make this tangible:
1. Terrible site performance.
2. A weird, unconventional CMS that doesn’t take care of SEO things out of the box.
3. A history of spam or site problems.
4. Lack of certain SEO table stakes technical concerns, like sitemaps.
When we engage with clients for campaigns that involve SEO in any way, we do an initial sanity check looking for problems that would be true blockers (as opposed to SEO hygiene minutiae). Usually clients address these things and we move on. But occasionally, if they can’t or won’t address them, we’d recommend against the channel.
3. Will Your Business Sustain Interest And Follow Through?
I imagine this sounds almost stupid to you as a reader. If you’re investing $10K and a few months in a lead generation experiment, wouldn’t you obviously stay interested?
You’d be surprised.
Client marketers, especially in the early stages, are wearing a lot of hats. It’s fairly easy to find yourself distracted and let signing off on briefs or publishing content slip by another day…or week…or month.
And that’s assuming that other, more holistic issues don’t crop up. Personnel turnover is incredibly common, site migrations happen frequently, and earlystage orgs tend to pivot.
The amount of ways orgs find to lose momentum would stagger you. It’s surprisingly common for us to have to keep nudging clients to finish their part of MVP engagements.
So we want to learn whether or not the channel’s success has enough of a role in the business’s success to sustain interest. And this is another one that we can really only learn via live engagement.
4. Will The Live Content Hit
Leading Indicators Of Success In Timely
Fashion And Drive Qualified Traffic?
It’s interesting that we’re on item four here, and it’s the first time Hit Subscribe’s methodology and deliverables are part of the equation, as opposed to client concerns. But in terms of what we want to learn in chronological order, this is the way it shakes out. A lot of failure patterns occur before the racers even leave their marks.
This is the phase where we’ll learn if the content performs on your site the way we hypothesize that it will.
At this point, it’s important to revisit the idea that we want to see ten pieces of content so that we have enough data from which to learn. That’s because SEO (and I’d argue digital marketing in general) is a game of chance where you stack the odds in your favor, like a casino. The goal is to win the majority of blackjack hands and a steady stream of money while understanding that you won’t win every hand.
We’ll plan ten posts for you and then monitor them right out of the gate. Google should index them fairly quickly, and then we should see them start bouncing around pages two through ten of the search engine for a few months. If we’re not seeing that right out of the gate, we’ll do some root cause analysis and try to course correct.
If that happens, we next expect them to settle onto page one and start driving traffic to the site. But I can tell you right out of the gate that maybe eight posts will wind up on page one driving traffic, and maybe two posts simply won’t, for reasons no one will ever truly know. That’s the nature of the game we’re playing here (and anyone who claims otherwise is in the digital snake oil business).
But what we want to learn is whether a predictable majority of them will rank in good position and earn traffic and, if not, why not?
5. Can You Do Something Productive With The Resultant Traffic?
Now we’re finally at the end of our learning, chronologically. And we’re also at the point where SEO as a distribution channel hands the baton to product marketing and your lower funnel tactics.
You’ve maintained interest, produced the content, and earned traffic for those efforts. What is that traffic doing? If the answer is that 100% of it is reading the articles and then leaving your site with no further action, then you have a vanity channel rather than a lead-generating one. (Luckily, this almost always fixable.)
Most of the organic visitors to your site will be landing there for the first time and encountering your brand for the first time. So, what next? Do you have a plan for that?
This doesn’t need to be perfect, but you should have something in mind. Personally, I think a good litmus test for success is “Do you have a way of initiating a subsequent interaction with this person?”
Here are some examples of what this might look like:
You have a call to action at the bottom of your post that goes to a sales page and prompts readers to fill out a form.
You drop a pixel and retarget them through social media later.
You invite them to sign up for your mailing list or for a webinar.
All of these are relatively light-touch ways for you to continue your conversation with them, and they’re also measurable. And crucially, they’re all lead pipeline. So if you have these in place and some of the searchers are taking the appropriate action, you have now proven the concept of using search as a lead generation channel.
Examples:
If you’re reading this and potentially interested in conducting an organic traffic MVP (with our help or just for yourself), let me make things a little more tangible
for you. You’re likely wondering what fit and non-fit for organic might look like in practice, especially for the “something productive” piece.
With that in mind, let me lay out obvious, possible, and likely non-fit example companies.
First of all, obvious fits. If you have a product offering with a low entry pricepoint, self-serve sign-up, and autonomous purchasing, it’s a fit. In other words, if searchers can land on your site, quickly grok what you do, and buy from you, organic makes sense almost without exception. Think SaaS, productivity tools, retail.
For marginal fits, think of purchase decisions becoming more complex. If the product is more expensive, more complicated, and requires more purchasing consideration, organic becomes less of a no-brainer. In this camp, you’ll find complex software, higher-ticket productized services, and small agencies, among others.
And finally, non-fits are companies where “does something productive” is hard to reconcile with a purchase. For instance, imagine enterprise software or global agencies, where commercial purchase decisions involve years-long sales processes and massive buyer committees. Who is going to read an Accenture blog post and say, “Oh, that reminds me, let me get out my credit card and buy a nine-figure consulting engagement”?
(Quick intermediate-level-SEO clarification: I’m not saying Accenture has no reason to show up in search. I’m saying they have no need for an MVP for organic leadgen.)
You Should Test The Channel
I’ve spent a good number of words here laying out Hit Subscribe’s methodology for helping clients evaluate the channel because it’s what I know. We’ve worked with well over 100 brands on organic campaigns And as our resident traffic modeler, I’ve had a front-row seat for all of it.
But I want to conclude by saying you should MVP this (and any) lead gen channel whether or not you ever reach out to us. At its core, digital marketing is experimentation and adaption. MVP-ing channels and tactics lets you shorten the feedback loop and iterate quickly to success.
So if you’re thinking of trying to bring search engine traffic to your site, sketch out a small prototype first. And crucially, execute it end-to-end not just on paper. All of your meaningful learning will happen in the trenches.
Interested In More Content
Like
This?
I’m Erik, and I approved this rant…which was easy to do since I wrote it. If you happened to enjoy this, I’ve recently created a Substack where I curate all of the marketing related content I create on different sites.
Totally free, permanently non-monetized, and you’re welcome to sign up.
Organic Traffic Recovery: How To Win SERPs And Influence Execs
In the last few months, I’ve been burning the midnight oil. By day, I run Hit Subscribe. But by night and weekend, I’ve buried myself in a sea of client analytics data, building out our content performance monitoring alpha offering.
I say this not to complain. After years of pretending to know what I’m doing in marketing, it’s fun to return to my roots of pretending to know what I’m doing in software engineering. I mention the midnight oil because it has served as fuel for deep, interesting insights into refreshing content and traffic recovery.
And today I want to offer up those insights to you in the form of a clear, actionable traffic recovery playbook.
Setting The Scene: What Happened To Our Traffic?
Imagine that you’re responsible for content on your site and your organic traffic graph looks like this.
Sooner or later, you’re going to have an uncomfortable conversation about how and why you’ve presided over a 40% traffic decline. From my outsider’s perspective, this most commonly occurs following an acquisition or perhaps a change in leadership. After obligatory pleasantries, one of your first professional encounters is explaining this graph.
There’s a pretty good chance that you have many valid reasons. Someone cut the content budget A staff writer quit and the backfill took forever The recent site redesign performs as well as a walrus on a unicycle.
But even as you say these things, they’ll sound like excuses to you And they’ll absolutely sound like excuses to the other party.
So here’s what you say instead:
I can do a detailed postmortem write-up on the traffic performance if you want. But if you’re interested, I have an actionable plan for how to recover the traffic and I can show you that.
These two sentences will absolutely and completely reset the conversation. You just need to be able to deliver on the actionable plan And that’s what I’m going to hand to you in the following sections, drawing on our now-unfair advantage of tons and tons of data
Traffic Recovery In Five Choreographed Steps
To turn “down and to the right” into “up and to the right,” here are five things that you should do in parallel, in priority order.
1. Fix acute, technical problems afflicting traffic-earning URLs.
2. Execute touch-up refreshes on slowly declining URLs.
3. Plan and execute comprehensive refreshes on underperforming URLs.
4. Consolidate and de-cannibalize cannibalizing URLs.
5. Plan and execute new content.
And here’s what that looks like in spreadsheet form, with more detail.
Here’s a quick legend for the columns in the sheet.
URL signal is what you’re observing in terms of the URL’s traffic pattern.
Effort is the relative amount of combined person-hours that goes into each of these.
Skills are the skillsets you’ll need to bring to bear to properly execute the tactic.
Who is a loose capture of the role of the person required.
Traffic payoff is when you can expect results. I’m basing this on a lot of empirical measurement at this point.
Time to rank is how long it takes new content to rank in the upper half of target SERPs (and thus earn significant traffic). The last three tactics all vary based on time to rank.
If you’ve never measured time to rank, you can ballpark it based on your site’s domain authority. That’s in tab 2 of the sheet, but here’s what it looks like:
Prerequisites: What You Need
Before going through each of these steps in detail, let’s look briefly at what you need in order to make this happen.
In terms of skill sets, you’ll need to have at your disposal someone with decent working knowledge of technical SEO (in the event of acute problems), someone savvy about keyword research and ranking, and a subject matter expert (SME) in whatever your content is about. Depending on whether there are acute problems and what those are, you also might want your web developer handy.
In terms of tooling, you really just need some kind of analytics installed on your site. The dashboarding I’m building acts (by design) as an easy-mode cheat code for this, but you can make it happen with basic analytics and some determination. You just need the ability to examine traffic to your individual URLs over time.
I wouldn’t rely on an external tool for traffic data. Something like Ahrefs is handy for analyzing trends, but it’s too imprecise here, where the details matter. A tool like that, with SEO audit functionality built in, might help you with any acute technical SEO triage.
Executing The Recovery Plan
Now on to execution I would suggest doing all of these things in parallel, if you have the bandwidth. But I have prioritized them in order of what will bring the most traffic the fastest
(I realize “acute problems” and “touch-up refresh” don’t strictly follow that order, but acute problems can sandbag all of the other items, so you want to do those first if they exist.)
1. Fix Acute Problems
First and foremost, you should fix acute problems with your site These can, of course, take the form of shotgun-foot issues like your site being down or changing your entire URL scheme without redirects But it often takes subtler forms and sometimes only happens to one or a handful of URLs.
If you’re looking at a URL’s traffic and see something like this, you have an acute problem on your hands.
As you inventory your URLs, you might find yourself horrified to discover occasional flatlines that have lasted indefinitely because you, say, accidentally re-saved it as a draft. Relax, it happens to way more sites than just yours. If you fix the problem, you’ll find that your position in search is more durable than you’d think.
Cataloging and explaining all of the ways you can set a URL’s traffic on fire is out of scope for this post. But go through your site looking for URLs that have declined very sharply in traffic, figure out why that happened, and fix it.
Bounceback tends to happen quickly.
2. Execute Touch-Up Refreshes
Next up, identify candidates for touch-up refresh A lot of SEO folks will recommend refreshing content once every six months or when it loses position for its primary keyword There’s nothing wrong with that it’s, in fact, how we used to recommend thinking about refreshes.
But these days we have a finer-turned early detector We look for a gradual, non-seasonal decline pattern like this one that started in September.
Before a URL starts to meaningfully lose ground on its primary keyword, it suffers gentler attrition on longer tail keywords. Usually when you execute a refresh during this time, it recovers on those longer tails and cements itself for the primary for a while.
The payback tends to come nearly immediately Here’s a graph of the traffic to twelve URLs in a collective state of decline as of June, with a red mark where a mass-refresh took place The result was a roughly 60% collective traffic increase in the next month.
This is also one of the easiest imaginable interventions. I’m sure every SEO tool on earth has a refresh guide on their site that you can follow and do pretty well. When you’re at this light stage of decline, all you really need to do is make sure the text is scannable and the info is current.
3. Execute Comprehensive Refresh
Comprehensive refreshes, on the other hand, are somewhat more involved. You’ll need to deploy this tactic for URLs that have declined for a long time and earn almost no traffic. Or you might need to use this tactic for URLs that have never earned traffic but target a high-volume keyword
And for these, you’ll need more elbow grease than just a touch-up. When we do these, we first assess winnability of the keyword and get client input on risk appetite. Assuming we want to take a swing at it, we then use Positional to conduct a gap analysis on the target URL, seeing what it lacks compared to URLs that rank.
Here’s a quick glance at what that looks like on our content lab site, where we can see relative word count, questions answered, and more.
In this case, I think the underperformance is down to having a gen-AI app spit out what appears to be some extremely verbose text and simply pasting it as-is. (This was an experiment I ran last year ) But in most cases, you’d likely see an underperformer be light on word count, headers, and searcher questions answered We’d take this information, turn it into a refresh brief, and execute that brief.
This approach requires enough SEO knowledge to conduct the gap analysis and the subject matter expertise of an author to address the content gaps. You can generally expect traffic recovery in roughly half the time new content takes to rank.
Here’s a recent example with traffic to a handful of underperforming URLs in aggregate.
This is a typical graph here Very low traffic (hence underperformer) with a slight, then large, lift coming in a couple of months.
4. De-Cannibalization
The topic of cannibalization and fixing it really deserves its own post But to summarize very briefly, cannibalization occurs when you create a number of URLs that all more or less target the same keyword There are two common scenarios where this happens:
1 A company spends years journal-blogging about (and indexing) whatever is on their mind that week and then only later decide to try for organic search
2. An enterprise outfit creates similar content after acquisitions or content silos with their own separate subdomains.
This also tends to be hard to recognize at the individual-URL-level in a vacuum. If you sell widgets, you’ll mainly recognize this by saying, “Wow, we’re experts in widgets, but none of our posts about widgets earn any search traffic and we don’t rank for ‘widgets’ anywhere.”
This is also not for the faint of heart. You’ll likely need to remove or noindex some posts, consolidate others, and treat this as a project It requires heavy SEO
confidence and subject matter expertise, and it takes longer to pay off.
That said, the payoff can be substantial.
With de-cannibalization, however, the significance can extend beyond gross traffic figures. It can result in winning keywords that have bedeviled you for a long time. And that also will probably look like a whole separate category of win to new leadership.
5. New Content
The last piece of this puzzle is, of course, new content. Refreshing content can serve as a powerful booster for your traffic, especially if you don’t have much history of doing it previously. But it is ultimately no substitute for new content if you want to grow or even sustain.
Your organic traffic to a URL will decay after 12–18 months, typically at a rate between 1% and 4%. Without intervention, it winds up closer to that 4% figure, but even with intervention, on a long timeline, it still decays. SERPs get more crowded and topical interest declines. (More on traffic declines here, if you’re interested).
New content is your antidote to that.
So while you’re working hard on the refresh front, make sure you’re identifying and targeting winnable keywords with new content. That has the longest payoff period for traffic, typically taking on a hockey-stick shape.
Finding good keywords is generally fairly easy easier than gap analysis and de-cannibalization And executing content is fairly easy for an SME But new content does tend to bog down in planning, ideation, and execution because of its optical importance to most organizations
Setting Expectations And Looking For Success
To lay out this plan in earnest, look at the traffic patterns for all of your indexed URLs. Then, based on those patterns, put them into the buckets above, if applicable. (Some won’t target organic, others will be new or growing, so this only applies to established ones with traffic and underperformers.)
If you then pursue all of these tactics in parallel, you’ll realize results that should please the person worried about decline. Your efforts will bear fruit immediately and then also see substantial lifts kick in at a few different points between today and when your new content starts to help.
To really drive this home, however, you need to capture some baselines, so that you can report in the way I have in this post. With the tooling I’ve built, it’s trivial for me, but it probably won’t be for you.
Tabulate the traffic data to each bucket of content before and after you execute the tactic. All kinds of wild stuff can impact your site’s overall and organic traffic, so you need to capture the before and after of the specific URLs that you’re working on. Otherwise, your site’s traffic might look flat because all of
your organic gains are offset by the decision to start targeting brand keywords with PPC or something.
To put it succinctly, take before photos so that the after photos mean something.
Hopefully you take this plan and recover yourself a lot of traffic. But I also hope that simply having it in your back pocket and presenting it wins you some brownie points and saves you some stress.
Interested In More Content Like This?
I’m Erik, and I approved this rant…which was easy to do since I wrote it. If you happened to enjoy this, I’ve recently created a Substack where I curate all of the marketing related content I create on different sites.
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Where Did My Traffic Go? Hint:
Wasn’t An Algorithm Update
If you were to take a stroll through Hit Subscribe’s offering page, you’d see that we now have a first-class “traffic recovery” offering. We added this because of the frequency with which we field the question, “Why is my [usually organic] traffic declining?!”
In fact, we field that question so frequently that I’m writing this blog post to distribute to friends and prospects to help with self-diagnosis, potentially saving
you some money on a possible engagement. So if that’s what brought you here, sorry about your traffic. But don’t worry. We’ll get it sorted.
In this post, I’ll discuss the most common reasons we see for lost traffic, describe the decline pattern you would expect to see if these things were happening, and explain how to start remediating the issue.
First Things First: Forget About “The Algorithm”
One of my all-time favorite books is Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, wherein he amuses the reader with assorted, specific paradoxes. The military grounds “crazy” fighter pilots and allows sane ones to fly, and they evaluate craziness by whether or not the pilot wants to fly. Anyone who doesn’t want to risk their life flying is non-crazy, and therefore must fly.
Of course, paradox exists beyond the novel. Probably preceding it and in a nod to the importance of status illegibility, Groucho Marx once quipped, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”
I’ll offer one another paradox for your consideration:
“The algorithm” only punishes those who go out of their way to avoid punishment.
In less quippy terms, if you’ve been generating content in good faith without thinking about “the algorithm,” you’re safe. Hit Subscribe, for instance, has managed analytics for more companies than I can count at this point. And we have never seen an algorithm update have any impact on anyone. We honestly don’t even pay attention to them.
I personally divide the SEO world into two camps: scumbag SEO and nonscumbag SEO. Our non-scumbag SEO methodology consists primarily of two steps:
1. Figure out what questions people are asking the search engine and answer those questions.
2. Do it on a site that doesn’t suck to visit.
Luckily, if you’ve been creating content in good faith and earning search traffic, you have, yourself, been executing this process. This is, almost without exception, the case for everyone that asks about traffic declines.
Scumbag SEO, on the other hand, adds various additional steps to the process:
1. Spam comment sections with nonsense that talks about your site.
2. Stuff keywords into your prose until your reader thinks they’re having a stroke.
3. Pay an “SEO firm” $5 per hour to do things you’d prefer not to know about.
4. Hack into abandoned WordPress sites and add links to your domain.
5. Conduct “SEO heists” using generative AI.
Scumbag SEO is a constant game of taking cost shortcuts and avoiding punishment, always staying one jump ahead of the breadline. And scumbag SEOs are who Google punishes with its algorithm updates.
If you’re doing scumbag SEO, trust me, you know it, and you know the risks. You don’t do that kind of thing by accident.
(As an aside, a lot of SEO conusltants will likely take issue with what I’m saying here. But they do so from a position of extreme motivated reasoning. Their livelihood depends on you believing the only way to avoid Google’s wrath is to pay an SEO consultant to execute an endless punch list of billable minutiae.)
So if it wasn’t the algorithm, where did your traffic go? Let’s take a look.
Here’s a quick caveat about the rest of this post before proceeding. When I talk about what the decline will commonly look like, I mean just that: commonly. There can always be edge cases that don’t follow the pattern.
With that lawyer-speak in the books, let’s talk traffic declining. Before looking at legitimate sources of traffic decline, let’s look at some things we see that aren’t actually problems.
1. Your Analytics Tool Is Broken
It might surprise you to learn how often the “problem” isn’t with the site or rankings but with the analytics tool itself. I’ve lost track of how many times over the years someone has, in a panic, asked why their traffic is all gone, only to experience great relief upon learning, no, it’s still there. Google Analytics (or whatever) is just broken, so you’re flying blind.
Lest you feel bad, here’s a screenshot of Hit Subscribe’s GA4 traffic over the last 12 months.
We don’t depend on the website as a source of lead generation, so we don’t pay a lot of attention to hitsubscribe.com’s analytics. If you doubt that, check out this two-ish month window where we “had zero traffic.”
Now, imagine the problem wasn’t yet fixed and we first noticed this flatline trend back in September. You could understand someone panicking a little.
But ask yourself if it seems likely that a normally functioning website would suddenly drop to zero traffic. I mean, I had personally visited the site, so it couldn’t actually be zero. So if you see something like this, take a breath, since the most likely situation is that you need to fix your analytics setup and your traffic will “come back.”
What You’d Commonly See: A sudden total, or near-total drop in traffic that stays at or around zero.
What To Do: Talk to whoever administers it about reconnecting your analytics tool.
2. Normal Seasonality
Next up in the non-issue category is seasonality. This is any traffic dip that you could expect because of what’s going on in the world.
For instance, in B2B settings, people tend to do fewer business-y things (such as visiting your website) at certain times of year: holidays, back to school, summer vacations, etc. All of those things can have an impact.
Take a look at this anonymized organic traffic graph, for instance, noting the dates.
What do you suppose happened there? A catastrophic traffic fall-off? Or, “Hey, it’s the week between Christmas and New Year, and very few people are doing business things.”
Christmas is an easy one, but seasonality occurs in all sorts of patterns (including the troughs above and in almost every B2B organic graph that represent weekends). So one of the first things that you should check when you notice a traffic drop is whether it might be attributable to world events.
What You’d Commonly See: A dip in traffic that followed a repeatable pattern.
What To Do: Form a hypothesis about seasonality, and then check to see whether you’ve lost traffic in this fashion in the past.
3. Sometimes It Be Like That
The last thing that I’ll mention is that traffic to your site is more of a game of aggregates and patterns than a precise daily march upwards in volume. In other words, you might have 600 visitors on Monday, only 500 on Tuesday, and 600 again on Wednesday for reasons that you’ll never discover.
When you’re looking at a channel with significant traffic, you have to take care not to focus too narrowly and thus detect phantom trends. If you fall into this trap, then you’d panic every Saturday about the graph in the last section.
Generally, we advise clients to look at a channel’s monthly production, which tends to provide enough data points to smooth out inexplicable anomalies and the vagaries of life. And even at the month level, occasionally you’ll see a temporary dip in an otherwise upward trendline. And you’ll probably never discover why, exactly.
What You’d Commonly See: A dip in traffic too new to have statistical significance.
What To Do: Chart out the trendline of traffic over the past few months and keep your eye on it for a few weeks to ensure it reverts to the mean.
Normal Wear And Tear
Alright. With the low-effort stuff out of the way, let’s move on to actual, meaningful traffic declines and what to do about them.
I’m calling this next category “normal wear and tear” because it’s what happens naturally, when you’re not doing anything “wrong” (by which I mean something that would materially impact your standing with Google and the search experience). To understand this, you need to axiomatically accept that when you do nothing to your site, your traffic will naturally decay over time. You can read more about that here, if you don’t want to just take my word for it.
4. Gradual Traffic Decay
Here’s a screenshot of Ahrefs’ approximation of organic traffic to a site This site published organic-traffic-targeting content from 2017 until the middle of 2019 and then stopped And this graph is a textbook example of what you should expect in that situation.
Any organic content that you publish will have a lead time before it starts to earn traffic. As a result, sites exhibit a seemingly curious property once you turn off the content faucet: they continue to grow for a while. (This often creates the illusion among site owners that organic traffic is more durable than it is.)
In the graph above, the site did indeed continue to grow for a while before eventually plateauing at the beginning of 2021 and starting a gradual decline. At least, that’s what it looks like in aggregate. In reality, decay for a given article starts 12 to 18 months after publication, and what actually happened at the plateau was that the site hit a tipping point where the decay of early articles caught up to the growth of more recent ones.
Usually when people ask me about their traffic and this is the situation, they’re asking when they’re in a steady state of decline (e.g., they’d ask at the beginning of 2022 in this graph). So they stopped producing much content a while ago, observed a plateau and decline, but hoped the traffic would “come back” after a while.
It’s not coming back, my friend. You’re going to have to reinvest in the channel if you want to regain your traffic.
What You’d Commonly See: A gradual decline in the low single-digit percents (assuming little to no new content).
What To Do: Start executing new content, or at least refreshing existing content.
5. Top-Heavy Traffic Decay
For this traffic decline, the same mechanics as the last one are at play, except that the nature of the traffic is a little different. In the graph above, the site had dozens of articles, the overwhelming majority of which were producing a decent amount of traffic. This is the healthy, expected situation if you’re intentionally targeting organic as a traffic or lead gen channel.
But there’s another common situation among site owners, particularly those who have stumbled into organic traffic rather than intentionally seeking it. This is usually among the set of people that journal-blog and engage in audience building (e.g., my consulting site, DaedTech). And the situation is that, out of say, 100 articles, three articles will account for 95% of their organic traffic.
When this is the case, those articles are still subject to the vagaries of traffic decay. But that decay tends to look much “lumpier” and sudden. If a single article is bringing half of the traffic to a site and that article declines in rankings, you might lose a quarter of your site traffic in a week.
Luckily, this is pretty easy to diagnose, since you can simply look at the traffic individually to the traffic earners and see where the bleeding is happening.
What You’d Commonly See: A sharper decline and plateau in traffic.
What To Do: Refresh the articles in the short term and try to make the channel less top heavy in the longer term.
6. Topical Interest Decline
This last one under natural wear and tear is probably the biggest bummer for any site owner. In your analytics dashboard, it will look much like the gradual traffic decay pattern, if a little sharper in downward slope. But it has much different implications.
This occurs when the broader internet is losing interest in what you’ve been posting about.
With normal traffic decay, you tend to lose traffic to other content creators targeting similar searches and competing with you for their visits. Topical
interest remains strong, but you have more trouble reaching them unless you update your content. But with interest decline, the searchers themselves go away.
For instance, let’s say you’d created a site dedicated to the erstwhile social media platform Google Plus. You’d have seen a gradual traffic decline over time without new content, but you’d even see it if you were producing new content. People stop googling and reading about the term, so the traffic simply isn’t there.
What You’d Commonly See: A gradual decline in the low single-digit percents, new content or not.
What To Do: You probably have bigger problems than generating traffic.
Technical And Site Issues
For this last set, I’ll cover some common scenarios where there’s some active, likely inadvertent self-sabotage happening. Please bear in mind this is not, and is not intended to be, an exhaustive list just some common ones that we see.
If, for instance, you queued up some scumbag SEO and made Google legitimately unhappy with your site, you would also lose traffic. But I’m not covering that here, under the fundamental premise of the post (that you’ve been acting in good faith).
7. You Unpublished Some Content
Don’t laugh. Accidentally unpublishing content happens way more frequently than you’d think.
For instance, about a month ago, I deleted an inactive user from our CMS. It turned out, for reasons that cost a web dev agency any future business of mine, that this user was inexplicably the author of all of our landing pages except the blog. So, before we reverted it to a valid state, our site briefly had nothing on it except the blog.
Now we obviously noticed this relatively quickly. But we probably wouldn’t have, had this user only had the byline on a few two-year-old blog posts. In that scenario, we’d simply have lost some traffic to formerly valid URLs now throwing 404s.
If this happens, you’ll generally see a sharp but noncatastrophic dip in traffic. So one of the first things I’d do is look for missing articles. (Explaining how to do this is a topic for another day—let me know if you’re interested.)
What You’d Commonly See: A sharp, noncatastrophic decline and then plateau.
What To Do: Republish the content and request indexing.
8. A Recent Migration Or Site Redesign Created Technical SEO Problems
By far the most frequent and tragic loss of traffic that we see arises from some kind of site overhaul or migration. I’m not exaggerating when I’d ballpark that our clients have collectively lost tens of millions of visitors over the last seven years to this.
There are far too many things that can go wrong for me to enumerate them here. But they tend to revolve broadly around content migration, site performance, improper setup of SEO artifacts (sitemaps, robots.txt, etc.), and improper redirection of content.
Luckily, this is extremely easy to diagnose, at least at the holistic level. You’re obviously going to know if you recently executed a site overhaul or domain name change.
Fixing it, however, can really run the gamut in terms of effort and complexity.
What You’d Commonly See: A sharp decline and then variability or fluctuation.
What To Do: If you don’t know where to start, ask folks in your network for advice or a referral. Don’t DIY this.
9. Something Acute Is Wrong With Your Site
In a way, this next situation is a generalized version of the last one. If there is something substantially wrong with your site, recent overhaul or not, it can catastrophically impact your traffic.
Like the last situation, this can really run the gamut: hosting issues, site security issues, server errors, a CMS bug, and many reasons beyond that. But the common thread is that something pretty major is going on with your site.
A lot of times this will cause problems beyond a drop in traffic, but not necessarily. Or it might just be that nobody is reporting those problems to you. Either way, if you see a large, sudden drop in traffic and it’s not a faulty analytics setup and you haven’t recently redone the site, the first thing to do is start troubleshooting for site problems.
What You’d Commonly See: A catastrophic decline and then plateau.
What To Do: Navigate to the site yourself and start at least doing some manual QA to see if there’s anything obviously wrong.
10. Something Subtle Is Wrong With Your Site
This last traffic loss scenario is probably the most bedeviling for all parties involved. If there’s something catastrophically wrong with your site, that’s awful, but at least it’s obvious what’s wrong and it’s all hands on deck to fix. But what about when there’s something seemingly subtle or unnoticeable tanking your traffic, like some kind of digital planet X?
Examples of this that we see include CMS SEO misconfiguration, slow page loading, bad user experience, searcher-unfriendly page layouts, and other similar arcana (for most). In these situations, sites still earn traffic and it can be extremely hard to know if anything is wrong, let alone what.
There’s a decent chance that someone with these problems would never notice them. After all, they might experience steady traffic growth, in spite of chronically underperforming where they should rank. Or if the subtle issue
cropped up more recently, it might take the form of gradual stagnation or decline, followed by underwhelming growth.
We have a methodology for this that would be hard to DIY. It involves assessing how an article should perform and then looking for systemic underperformance.
Without that, DIYers generally need to rely on (noisy) SEO tools for site audits. That can be a frustrating path, but it’s a decent starting point at least, if you think your site is underperforming.
What You’d Commonly See: A medium to gradual decline and then plateau or underwhelming growth.
What To Do: Use one or more SEO tools to audit your site, start addressing issues, and see if things improve.
Troubleshooting Traffic Drops, Philosophically
I’ve laid out a laundry list of common situations that we see, how to recognize them, and what to do next. But I’d like to close with a bit of advice that applies to any and all situations, even ones not covered here.
Deconstruct the problem.
Traffic to your site doesn’t come holistically. It comes via individual URLs.
So start by breaking down the traffic to each individual URL. This will allow you to isolate the source of decline, which will in turn make for easier troubleshooting.
Did all of the decline come from one URL? Probably something wrong with that URL.
Did all of the decline come from pages tagged as glossary? Probably something wrong with the glossary.
Has just about every page on your site seen a decline? Probably something systemic.
When the problem space seems overwhelming, it’s tempting to attribute your fate to some capricious, angry search god punishing you for your content sins. And then it’s tempting to just give up.
But once you start to break it down, you’ll almost always find that the problem is much more mundane…and much more fixable. And then you’ll have your traffic back before you know it.
Interested In More Content Like This?
I’m Erik, and I approved this rant…which was easy to do since I wrote it. If you happened to enjoy this, I’ve recently created a Substack where I curate all of the marketing related content I create on different sites.
Totally free, permanently non-monetized, and you’re welcome to sign up.
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