SEO traffic to the homepage is down across sites

[WWWSEO]

Week over week, I've noticed that organic traffic (and oftentimes revenue) for the homepage are down across most of our sites compared to last year. Brand search interest is down for a number of the brands, but in a lot of these cases, it's not down so much that it would make sense for how much the homepage is down (for example: brand search interest was down 4% last week compared to last year, but the homepage traffic was down 32% in visits).

What I've done is generate entry page reports (this year vs. last year) and then bucket the pages by homepage, category pages, and product pages. In most cases, category pages are up year over year for traffic and revenue. I'm concerned that the homepage being down is more than a brand heat issue, but I haven't come across anything out of the ordinary in Google Search Console and keywords are pretty consistent in performance for the most part. Branded keywords continue to rank at #1, too.

Any thoughts as to what else I can look into?

[DannyHoodless]

You could perhaps ignore the brand search interest, or the keywords that are being searched by Google and instead look at what your site is actually delivering.

What about your meta descriptions? Use them like a sales pitch & compare them to the other search results. I have found it is often the case that sites lose traffic in circumstances like this when a competitor ups the game & grabs more attention.

[WWWSEO]

I can take a closer look into competitors and see what's going on there. The way our meta descriptions are structured is first a call out of "official site" (we've noticed a better CTR by calling this out in both organic and paid), action verb, targeted keywords, and "Free shipping". In more of a consumer-friendly flow, but that's the basic structure of call outs.

[StrategyPlusOM]

What is direct traffic doing?

And have does mobile organic compare to desktop organic year-on-year?

[MattRoney]

Hi WWW SEO! How is this going? We'd love an update.

[WWWSEO]

Hey Matt! I'm still trying to figure this out. I'm wondering if it's in part a tracking "issue" or inconsistency. I was looking through both desktop and mobile traffic and they are both down, so it's not like one or the other is the main driver. Organic traffic contribution continues to be down year over year.

Before we moved our sites over to the new platform, some traffic had been directed to a Country Selection page (I can't remember all the details behind this at the moment). When comparing year over year data (we use Omniture), we're including traffic that came through the Country Selection page and went through to the US site. I don't know if there's something with this particular page, or if we are indeed comparing apples to apples by leaving it in (without it, homepage is up. Category pages are generally up across all brands).

Still a lot of digging to do and I keep coming up at dead ends, it seems.

[TrentonGreener]

WWW SEO,

Mind dropping us a link to the website in question so we can take a closer look? This will allow me to check your tracking implementation and to do a quick check on other factors that may be causing an issue here.

Thanks!
Trenton

[WWWSEO]

Hi Trenton -

Sure. Here are the 2 that I'm most waiting to anniversary the platform launch for: http://bit.ly/1XgbhtZ and http://bit.ly/1Xvikzl.

I've also seen http://bit.ly/1XvivuF take a hit in homepage traffic (mobile traffic to the homepage is down more than desktop. The desktop vs. mobile performance is kind of a case by case situation, since I haven't really seen any patterns that encompass all brands).

Thanks!

[TrentonGreener]

Hey WWW SEO,

It seems to me that the pages' implementations seem correct, so it doesn't appear to be a tracking-based issue.

Have you taken to top terms that are driving traffic to these pages (Google Search Console or internal data if you have it) and plotted them in Google Trends to see how they compare over the past 24 months or so? Some may not be high-enough volume, but those that are should give you a feel for where the the volume stands in YoY comparison.

Regards,
Trenton