SEO: High intent organic revenue down in Europe

[RS-Marketing]

Our team is stumped and we are hoping some of you might have some insight! We are seeing a drop in Europe organic revenue and we can't seem to figure out what the core cause of the problem is.

What's interesting, the high intent traffic is increasing across the business, as is organic-attributed revenue.  And in Europe specifically, other channels appear to be doing just fine.  This seems to be a Europe high-intent SEO problem.

What we have established:

• Revenue was at a peak in Q4 2017 and Q1 2018
• Revenue dips in mid-late Q2 2018 and again in Q4 2018 where it has stayed low since
• Organic traffic has gone up, conversion rate has gone down, purchases have gone down
• Paid search traffic has gone up, conversion rate has gone down slightly, submissions have gone up
• Currency changes are minimal
• We cannot find any site load issues    What we know happened during this time frame (January 2018 onward):
• Updates to the website (homepage layout, some text changes) end of April 2018
• GDPR end of May 2018
• Google Analytics stops being able to track Firefox

Europe is a key market for us and we cant figure out what might be causing this to happen - again, only in Europe - beyond GDPR and the changes we've made on our site is there anything else major that we're missing that could be causing this? Or does anyone have any insights as to where we should look?

Thank you in advance!

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi There,

The information above looks insufficient to draw conclusions, however, I understand your main concern is about a drop in organic traffic from a specific geographic region and conversion drop as well.

Here are some further questions:

1. -Is your industry seeing a downtrend in general in Europe or elsewhere?
2. How are you managing the international SEO of your website? What is the main target market for your website? How is it international targeting setup in google search console (old version)?
3. Is your business cyclical in nature?
4. Have you analyzed whether the earlier traffic was spam(bot ) traffic, how much is the drop from such traffic?

Thanks,

Vijay

[RS-Marketing]

Hello, thank you for your reply!

1.  We are just seeing this trend in European countries.
2.  We manage SEO data with google analytics, console, VPN searchers and ahrefs.  Our target market is researchers that are publishing research (specifically non-native speakers).
3. Yes it is cyclical - we typically see a lull during the summer and winter holiday (similar to the US academic calendar). For most of our customers, it depends on how often they publish. 
4.  I'm not familiar with spam (bot) traffic. What is the best way to look into this?

[RS-Marketing]

@Vijay Gaur I also wanted to add that we checked and haven't seen any issue with bot traffic