We’ve been experiencing an interesting pattern in our branded organic traffic over the last few months. I know SEOmoz can’t be the only ones experiencing this trend, so I want to call out what I’ve been seeing in the SEOmoz data.
We’ve been seeing gentle but steady organic growth in 2012, along with a small seasonal dip in early summer:
However, when we look at just our branded organic traffic, we’re seeing a different story altogether:
Branded organic visits are taken from an Advanced Segment I’ve set up in Google Analytics. It captures any organic traffic that comes in via keywords including our brand terms (seomoz, open site explorer, etc.) and variations on our brand terms (seo moz, seo mox, OSE, etc.).
Digging into this data a bit, I compared visits from April 2012 (the first available 30-day month of the year) with September 2012 in GA and got the following results for our top four branded terms:
- “seomoz” declined 26.26%
- “open site explorer” declined 37.04%
- “opensiteexplorer” declined 28.16%
- “seo moz” declined 33.10%
Is interest in our brand declining?
I was pretty sure that the decrease in branded traffic wasn’t a decrease at all. Instead, our drop in branded keyword tracking was a casualty of Google masking keyword data for some users.
However, I needed to make sure we weren’t losing brand equity. Reduced search volume for our branded terms would be a bad sign for us. I put together a test to make sure our branded organic traffic (probably) wasn’t actually declining.
I took a look at Google Trends data for the four terms listed above and found that while some of them have seen some volatility in interest over the course of 2012, none of them has seen a significant decline in search volume when comparing April to September (note the drop at the end from this week’s incomplete data).
The term “seomoz” remains very steady:
“open site explorer” saw dips in interest in April and July, but had returned to the 80-100 level by September:
“seo moz” has seen the most significant decline, but by removing the three outlying peaks from this cart, we can see interest remaining fairly steady (especially since July):
“opensiteexplorer” has actually seen an increase in interest since late July:
For one last sanity check, I exported our rankings history from 2012. I was pretty sure I’d have noticed if SEOmoz properties had slipped from #1 for these terms, and sure enough, they haven’t.
What is going on with our branded traffic?
I’m confident that I cracked the case in regards to our branded traffic. If search volume hasn’t declined and we are still ranking the same, it’s a reasonable assumption that our branded organic traffic has not, in fact, fallen off.
The culprit is our old pal, (not provided).
In the same period that we saw the decline in branded traffic listed above, we also saw a 42.02% increase in (not provided) traffic. In September, (not provided) accounted for 63% of our organic search traffic, compared to 51.7% of our organic traffic in April. Remember when (not provided) was only supposed to affect 5% of searches? That was fun.
Since (like most sites) our branded terms are also our most popular overall organic terms, it stands to reason that a large portion of that (not provided) traffic is made up of branded organic traffic. SEOmoz is harder-hit by this than some other sites because we have such a tech-savvy audience: our users are more likely than some other demographics to be using Firefox or signed in to Google Accounts.
What kind of increase have you seen in (not provided) traffic since the beginning of the year? Is it affecting your branded terms?
