Traffic from organic grew significantly. But why?

[ETonnard]

Hello,

In our e-commerce business we saw significant growth in organic traffic during the summer months.
This is a period we sell a lot of custom made photobooks. The weird thing is that we didn't do any changes to our photobook pages since 2013, where we didn't have these peaks.
So this is good news, but...

What would be a good way to start investigating the reason of this increase? 
I have a hard time answering the 'why' question.

Thank you very much for your help!

With kind regards,

Yannick

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[donford]

Hi Yannick,

Sounds like you got mentioned on a few post. Perhaps a DIY blog or the like. These tend to drive traffic fairly well. Check your back link profile and see if you noticed any new sites popping up.  A few months ago customer service said "what is up with all these new teflon o-rings sales lately", I did the research and it turns out we were mentioned on two forums with links to our teflon o-ring section.

Hope this helps,

Don

[Houses]

If you have Google Analytics (or similar) take a look at where the traffic is coming from and compare it to any historical data if you have it.

It could be something happened online like better rankings or a buzz about you on social media as Don said a link in a forum or it could be something offline like a newspaper or magazine article on you or even a mention on TV. Check referrers in Analytics.

If you have been at any trade shows that could also have driven traffic. Check 'city' report in Analytics.

If it's possible you may also be able to implement a 'where did you hear about us' question at some point - either when people come to buy something or as an after sales thing. That would help for future.

All good news for you though as you said but it's better to know why it happened so you can do more of it.

Hope that helps

[Travis_Bailey]

Hi Evelien,

Does organic traffic appear to be attributable to any particular country or countries? This may sound strange, but I wonder if a competitor pulled out of the market. It appears just about every competitor you have in google.be got a pretty nice organic increase around that time, which has continued. Kruidvat seems to have the lion's share now.

Last I knew, Luxembourg was something of a tax shelter. With the recent changes in VAT, I wonder if a significant competitor or competitors found it difficult to continue operations. But that's just a 'shot in the dark' on my part.