Researching search volume drop

[MarkWill]

I am seeing a pretty precipitous drop in search volume traffic (see link). My keyword rankings don't seem to have suffered too much over this period. In fact, my #1 keyword have actually increased slightly in this timeframe.

Two questions...

• Is there some way to assess overall search volume across my tracked keywords (to see if this is just a case of overall searches dropping)?
• Is there a recommended plan of attack for investigating drops like this - beyond overall search volume, what other data might be important in identifying the cause of this. In short, I'm looking for some logic/structure for how I investigate this, using Moz tools and reports.

Thanks.

Mark

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[CleverPhD]

If you wanted to look at relative search volume, you can look at Google Trends https://www.google.com/trends/   I would also see if you notice any trends in Google Search Console under Search Traffic > Search Analytics > Impressions

What your graph has me wondering is if this is an attribution issue with GA?  On the grey line, Moz is simply taking your GA traffic that is tagged as organic and showing it in the graph.  If you have an attribution issue in GA, organic traffic may be showing up as direct traffic.  If there is anything wonky in the traffic attribution, GA will put it as Direct. You have this classic article by Groupon that was a good example of how organic can be attributed incorrectly.   http://searchengineland.com/60-direct-traffic-actually-seo-195415

Look at your overall traffic in GA and then add a segment for organic traffic and then direct traffic.  If your overall traffic is constant and you see organic going down while direct traffic is going up, you have your answer.    As I understand it, this phenomenon is due to browser issues, so see if you have had more traffic recently from a given browser and that may give you another clue.

Another thing to check, you should be able to look at your organic traffic in GA and see if it is the same as Moz, or not. If not, ping the Moz folks to make sure your data from GA is coming in properly.  May be some data import issues there.

My other guess here is that your ranking is ok, but your click rate has been jacked.  Google Search console will show you CTR over time, and that may help.  Look and see, did you change meta descriptions?  Did you change up your schema markup so previously you had rich snippets in the SERP, but now you do not.  You could potentially keep ranking, but loose CTR.

These are all things I would look at, but at this point, your guess is as good as mine.  Looking through the above will probably prompt you to check other things that might give you an answer.

Good luck!

[ClaytonJ]

Have you checked on WMT's?  For Impressions for those keywords and CTR? That is the starting point in my view.  If you CTR is steady and your impressions have dropped significantly you have to work out what pages you have dropped off - it may not necessarily be the main keyword.

I would start on WMT's..

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[MarkWill]

Awesome responses everyone - really appreciate this. It seems I have my work cut out across the various tools to try to identify root cause. At first, quick glance I don't see anything obvious popping up (for example to organic vs. direct) but I have more to check, based on the excellent input from the three of you. Thank you again!

Mark