Analyzing Google Search Traffic Fluctuations Unrelated to Keyword Rankings (SEO Case Study)

By Ethan Lazuk

By and large, the job of an SEO is to optimize a website’s presence in organic search results to meet or support the business goals of that website. Those goals may be to generate sales for the business’s products or services, encourage contact-form or request-a-quote submissions from qualified traffic, or simply to build brand awareness.

Achieving higher keyword rankings or earning featured snippets for content may help with a website’s business goals, but they could also be considered SEO vanity metrics if they don’t ultimately further those goals.

That said, it’s a sweet feeling to optimize a website page, improve rankings for its target keywords, and see increased traffic come in as a result.

But what about when traffic increases and there’s no rankings change to speak of? Certainly seasonality and searcher activity can cause ebbs and flows for traffic where the position of the page remains unchanged. The same can be said for SERP layout updates, where the result’s position is static, but the visibility changes due to knowledge panels, People Also Ask, or other SERP features or changes.

But none of those are what we’re talking about here.

In this mini case study, we’re going to look at a few examples of websites that had traffic fluctuations due to external factors unrelated to changes in rankings or SERP layouts, including:

• Shark Tank effect
• Viral social media effect
• Paid search effect

Caveat: the dynamism of SERP results, between Google’s constant tests and personalization for some users, means we’re not completing discounting ranking or SERP layout factors, but more so acknowledging the primary causes of these traffic fluctuations were outside of SEO factors.

How Are We Attributing the Traffic Changes to Outside Factors?

In two of the cases discussed below, we’ll be using Google Search Console query data to pinpoint the external influences on traffic. Often these fluctuations relate to branded traffic, either for the brand name itself or one of its hero products. How we identify the outside influence is by identifying spikes in clicks or impressions for certain modifier terms that we can reasonably associate with an outside event. In the third case, the queries themselves don’t change, but we can time the traffic fluctuations by finding changes in other channel’s traffic levels based on Google Analytics data.

Example 1: The Shark Tank Effect

This first website is an e-commerce website that has a hero product that was featured on the TV show Shark Tank. To date, the website hasn’t done much SEO to drive incremental traffic, such as from non-brand queries related to blog articles. Therefore, it’s traffic is primarily branded and product specific.

This is what the long-term Google Search trend looks like, mostly low levels of clicks followed by single-day spikes that raise clicks by as much as 8,000% overnight.

You guessed it, those spikes correlate with reruns of Shark Tank episodes that feature the product!

How do we know this? Check out the queries driving the most clicks during those daily spikes:

The top queries all contain the word “shark tank” in them. Besides, the positions for those queries largely remain unchanged, since they’re branded for the product.

In conclusion, single-day spikes in traffic like this can be attributed to outside promotions that raise brand awareness, i.e., the Shark Tank effect.

But what about when traffic spikes for longer periods of time?

Example 2: The Viral Social Media Effect

While one-day traffic spikes may be attributed to a single occurence like a re-airing of a TV show episode, spikes lasting a few days may be caused by viral moments on social media. These tend to cause a rise in traffic for a few days, followed by a gradual decline back to equilibrium.

Here’s an example of a single query. It spiked about 1,000% in clicks overnight, reached a 2,000% height a few days later, then continued to hover around 300-500% of its normal levels for weeks afterward.

This traffic was likely driven by a viral video on TikTok. How do we know this? The query being searched is technically a branded query, but it’s not the name usually associated with the brand.

What it does correspond with, though, is the brand’s TikTok profile name. And as you can see, rankings for this branded query are unchanged, but clicks and impressions spike, driven by visibility on social media.

So now we’ve seen two examples of traffic spikes, including one-day spikes and multi-day spikes that simmer down over several weeks.

What about when traffic declines?

Example 3: The Paid Search Effect

If a website was traditionally getting most of its branded traffic from organic search, and suddenly ramps up its paid search efforts for those queries, the results for organic traffic can be swiftly noticeable. In this case, the website’s organic traffic saw a substantial decline.

Before showing this, I’ll note that revenue from the website’s digital channels on a whole improved. So if the goal of digital marketing is to further the website’s business goals, we can argue that establishing synergy between organic and paid can be a good thing, as long as we’re able to isolate and explain why organic traffic is declining.

Here’s a trend line for organic traffic starting just before the paid search campaign ramped up and how quickly it reached a new equilibrium for organic traffic at about one-third its previous levels.

As you can see from the query data, the positions for these queries (all branded variations of the website name) stayed consistent or even improved some. Yet clicks are down. Impressions being down some could be partially attributed to the click decline, but the difference in impression and click numbers is too substantial to credit this only to fewer impressions.

Now let’s look at the difference in users and sessions over that time period for Paid Search and Organic Search in GA4 (note that this data isn’t filtered by country):

Organic Search users declined around 1.8k, whereas Paid Search users increased around 4k.

Takeaways

The three examples above show how levels of organic traffic can fluctuate due to factors aside from keyword rankings. One-day spikes can be attributed to single events, like an airing of a TV show episode or infomercial. Multi-day spikes that gradually trend down can be attributed to viral social media moments that linger in the ether for several weeks. While sharp and sustained declines can be attributed to traffic migrating to other channels, such as paid search ads.

*Important to note, these aren’t the only explanations for these types of organic traffic fluctuations, but they are notable examples of the types of trends to look for when diagnosing organic traffic swings that aren’t answerable by rankings data alone.

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing! 🙂