10 Remarketing Tools For Reengaging & Winning The Conversion Ep. 538
10 Remarketing Tools For Reengaging & Winning The ConversionRemarketing can help get your brand in front of a more relevant audience. Here are 10…
Agency & Business Growth
10 Factors that Maybe Impacting Your Organic Traffic by Stephanie LeVonne #332
Ten factors can impact organic traffic including unindexed pages, bot filter gaps, site update errors, URL confusion, structured data issues, promotional timing, price changes, affiliate outranking, new Google ad placements, and industry trend shifts.
Key takeaways
- Check your robots.txt file and use site-colon searches to confirm pages are indexed in Google.
- Filter out known bots and ghost spam in Google Analytics to get accurate bounce rate and time-on-site data.
- Add notes inside Google Analytics whenever you launch a promotion or make a major site change.
- Use 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors after any site update to protect existing rankings.
- Include paid search in your strategy since Google removed right-side ads, compressing organic visibility.
Organic search, unlike its paid counterpart, comes with a unique set of challenges in diagnosing a decline in traffic and conversions.
About this episode
Experiencing fluctuations in organic traffic and rankings? Columnist Stephanie LeVonne has a list of factors to check and how to address them.
Questions this episode answers
Why would organic traffic drop after a website redesign or update?
Recent site updates, including removing pages, reordering navigation, or changing URLs without proper 301 redirects, can cause traffic declines. The hosts recommend monitoring top-ranking pages closely, keeping their URLs stable, and tracking 404 errors after any change to catch redirect gaps quickly.
How do bot filters affect Google Analytics data?
Bots and ghost spam inflate bounce rates and deflate time-on-site metrics. The hosts recommend checking the box to exclude known bots and spiders, then manually filtering additional spam URLs each month. Removing them can drop reported bounce rate from around 90 percent to around 60 percent.
What is the sale hangover effect on organic traffic?
When a big promotion runs one year but not the next, year-over-year comparisons show a false traffic decline. The hosts suggest adding dated notes inside Google Analytics whenever a major promotion launches so future reporting can account for those spikes accurately.
How can affiliate or reseller sites hurt a brand's organic rankings?
Resellers or affiliates can begin outranking the original brand for its own branded search terms, which the episode calls an uncontrollable factor. The hosts note this is especially a risk for smaller businesses whose competitors or partners carry similar products and invest heavily in SEO.
In their words
Once you remove all of these bots that have 100% bounce rate, then you'll get a closer look at what your numbers really are.
Charles Lewis
Did you run a big promotion last year, such as a sample or flash sale? Did it coincide with the same week this year? If not, then your year-on-year comparison will be skewed.
Charles Lewis
Terms defined in this episode
- Ghost referral
- Spam traffic that hits Google Analytics directly using random tracking IDs without ever actually visiting the website, inflating session counts.
- Structured data markup
- Code added to a website, such as schema for name, address, phone, hours, and products, that helps search engines display rich snippets; it must be monitored because content changes can alter it without warning.
- URL confusion
- A situation where two site URLs target similar or identical content and phrases, making it unclear to search engines which page to rank and to users which page to visit.
- Promotional cadence
- The pattern of running sales or marketing promotions over time; inconsistency between years skews year-over-year organic traffic comparisons.
Full transcript is being added.
Matthew Bertram
AI keynote speaker · Owner & CEO, EWR Digital · President, ModalPoint
Matthew Bertram is an AI keynote speaker, creator of DIG™ (Digital Information Governance), and owner and CEO of EWR Digital. He helps energy and industrial leaders win visibility in AI search (GEO and AEO), is President of ModalPoint and CMO of the Oil & Gas Global Network, hosts The Best SEO Podcast, and has authored eight books including LLM Visibility. More about Matthew Bertram.
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