For example, you might be a new start-up business who is not very
well-known in the industry; but fast-forward three months; and your
offline advertising may have made your brand quite well-known, so a
lot more users may now search for you.This would increase the traffic
to your site but this would only be because of the increase in brand
awareness and nothing to do with a natural SEO campaign. By filtering
out brand we can see what your SEO campaign is actually doing to the
traffic to your site.
Recently, across a number of clients we have been seeing fluctuations
in brand visits to sites comparing year-on-year figures. Natural
search campaigns [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_advertising]
might be performing well and non-brand traffic seeing good increases
across a number of different terms; but despite this, the brand visits
are not following the same trend and might only be increasing a small
amount, seeing some dips or even a small decrease.
Changes to site traffic sources year on year
This graph shows the percentage change in traffic year on year for a
few different traffic sources across one of our clients. When I
stopped to look at this, there was no obvious reason why the drop in
organic brand traffic was occurring. The clients were still doing a
lot of offline PR and one different client even had a big campaign
going on which was creating lots of social chatter so in theory brand
traffic should be at least slowly increasing if not staying static. So
what are the possible causes of these changes?
PPC cannibalisation
Initially, the main reason which might come to mind would be the
increased PPC brand bidding either by our clients or by competitors
who are taking advantage of stronger brands. This would increase the
chance of a search going to the site (or competitors site) from a PPC
brand term.
You would therefore expect the brand traffic through PPC to be
changing proportionately to the changes seen in organic traffic, but
this is not often the case and in some instances the PPC brand traffic
has seen the same changes.
Provided keywords
Another reason might be the ‘call recorder
[https://apps.apple.com/us/app/call-recorder-icall/id1447098963] ’
keyword that Google dealt to SEO’s across the globe a few months
back. Some brand traffic will now be being counted as non-brand
traffic. There are some ways around this to see if much of this could
be related to brand, but quite often the number of ‘provided’
visits is so small that even if all the visits were brand related
queries, then this still does not account for the drop.
Apps and direct traffic
Another possible explanation is the rise in the use of apps which some
clients have. If users have these installed then they are likely to
use this more often than searching for a brand term in Google.
This would reduce brand and direct visits and not be recorded in
analytics, so it is important to track the number of users who have
downloaded the app. However this does not explain the changes when
clients do not have apps.
Brand search is changing
All these examples might lead to small fluctuations in brand traffic
but one other explanation is that people are genuinely no longer
searching for brands. People are nowadays more interested in great
deals than great brands.
They are more interested in using a site which will provide the best
price, rather than the best customer service, best user experience or
most well-respected providers. There was a survey carried out by
Accenture recently that looked at the shopping habits and brand
loyalty of a range of online shoppers in the US.
This shows that even though people might be more satisfied by your
brand, they are still happy to look around for a better deal. With the
rise of mobile search, recent surveys suggest that mobile search
accounts for 40% or more of some sites traffic, people are perhaps
changing the way they search. Are people becoming more used to
searching for what they want rather than who they know?
If you are a big brand, then a user on a mobile device is not going to
want to spend hours using your search interface on their smartphone
when they can type one product into Google.
So what does this mean for brands? In the past Google has been quick
to try and help well-respected brands rank well in search results, so
maybe people are having to switch their search habits and be more
generic, or search for products rather than brands and then click on
the brand name they know in the product search result.
If you have a big brand and rely on customers knowing you and
returning to use your site then you might need to rethink this and
focus on how you will be able to drive traffic through non-brand terms
and make sure that if you appear for these products that you have an
established brand name that is going to be the reason that makes
someone click on your listing.
One thing we have seen a lot of lately is the rise of the exact match
domains (EMD’s). These are sites where someone buys up a domain name
that matches a specific search term and then can very quickly rank
well for that search term. Sometimes these can be a great way to do
business and there are some big sites out there which are EMD’s but
the problem comes when Google does finally decide to devalue EMD’s.
Is your site still going to be strong enough to perform in the search
results when Google doesn’t look as much at the domain name and
instead is looking at other on-site factors and link profiles? If you
have not invested enough in building up a brand reputation around your
site then you are not going to be able to continue to bring in the
traffic you have been used to.
SEO is about creating a good online brand profile, combining that with
a great website, and then ensuring that you can get traffic from not
only your brand name but from other search queries and referrals from
social media and other sites.
The more established and trusted your brand name is the easier it
should be to do this, but even if you are not so well-known it is
still worth investing some time in making sure that your brand becomes
more well-known. Without broadening the way you get your traffic you
are leaving yourself open to failure if Google decides they don’t
like you.
If anyone else has seen any similar changes in brand traffic over the
last year then get in touch I’d be interested to hear any other
possible causes for the brand fluctuations.
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13/02/2020 Last update