Is Your Branded SEO Traffic Dropping? Discover 7 Potential Causes

Branded SEO traffic is the organic search traffic going to your website through searches made with your brand name. This type of traffic is very important and specifically shows that the brand has strongly loyal customers.

Therefore, any sudden or gradual decline in the number of branded SEOs can be very worrying and hurtful to your business operation. It is important to identify possible reasons for this decline to correct the situation and keep your brand visible on the web.

Cause 1: Algorithm Update

Search engines are active, and Google in specific updates its algorithm very often to set a better relevance for search results. This might drastically change the rank of the website, even for branded searches.

Algorithm changes can impact your website’s appearance on search results in case of an update. If you do not optimise it with the change, you will experience a decline in traffic.

Solutions:

• Stay Informed: Look out periodically for updates from Google and other search engines.
• Audit Your Website: Do regular SEO audits to be in line with the latest guidelines.
• Adapt Swiftly: Implement the essential changes to keep in line with the influences of the updates.

Cause 2: Technical SEO Problems

Technical SEO problems ruin your website’s performance or hinder it from showing up in search. Several common issues include a lag in load time, broken links, or poor mobile optimisation.

Technical problems can result in poor user experience and force visitors to bounce back from your website. And with this high bounce rate, your ranking is compromised, even for branded searches.

How to Fix Technical SEO Issues

• Regular Audit: Technical problems are easily recognisable and thus fixable by using a number of tools such as Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, GTmetrix, and SEMrush.
• Page Speed: Optimise images, leverage browser caching, and use a content delivery network (CDN).
• Mobile Optimisation: Your website should be mobile-friendly, responsive, and navigable.

Cause 3: Increasing Competition

The universe of digital is a very competitive one, and new businesses are being formed every other day. New competition can affect your branded SEO traffic by capturing all those keywords which your brand has optimised for years.

There is going to be an increase of branded SEO traffic negatively affecting you. They will outsmart you in competitive optimisation of their websites, outrank themselves over branded keywords that you may have been ranking on, and in time, they’ll steal your traffic.

How to Keep Competing

• Continual Improvement: Periodically, when your content can wear out and your SEO methods, keep refreshing your techniques to stay ahead of the competition.
• Competitor Tracking: You should engage in competitor tracking and make use of Ahrefs or Moz that will help keep track of your competitors and allow for your strategy to be easily amenable.
• Brand Differentiation: Allow people to know what exactly makes your band different. This will allow for increased conversion rates and encourage client loyalty.

Cause 4. Brand Reputation Troubles

Reputations may be steeped in further if there are bad reviews, negative press, or social media backlash.

Cuts in traffic from such tarnished brand reputations mean a lack of use, therefore a fall in branded search traffic. These effects are usually reflected in the brand domain visibility in overall SEO performance.

How to Manage Brand Reputation

• Monitoring Online Presence: By using many tools, one can use the Google Alert or Social Mention in tracking any mentions of their brand.
• Address Issues Promptly: Respond professionally and constructively to poor reviews and feedback.
• Build Positive Reputation: Ask your happy users to write reviews and share their stories.

Cause 5: Shifting User Behaviours

Given the craze with technology, changes in user behaviour are an integral part of evolution. A change may occur due to changes in technology, trend, or just preference. The impacts may be seen on how users are searching or interacting with a brand online.

If users change how they search for your brand or prefer different platforms, you may see a decline in branded SEO traffic

How to Adapt to Changes in User Behaviour

• Do User Research: Regularly surveying your audience, then analysing the feedback, will give you a great indication of what they do and don’t like, and how they act.
• Adapt Your Content Strategy: Try to align the content that you’re creating with current trends and user interest.
• Diversify Platforms: Be available on at least more than one platform, especially social media, to reach the most extensive possible audience.

Cause 6: Low-Quality Content

High-quality content is of vital importance for decent SEO performance. Outdated, unnecessary, or lousy content will irritate customers and damage your rankings.

The lousy content is bound to result in less interaction with the site, as in more bounces, and in turn, this will spill into your branded SEO traffic.

How to Make the Content Quality Better

• Update regularly: For your content material, you need to regularly refresh, which will keep your content relevant and fresh.
• Value-oriented: Ensure whatever you are writing is related to your audience and answers their queries along with problem-solving.
• Inclusion of Multimedia: Ensure to include some image, video, or even infographics, as this will spike quality with an upward curve in the level of engagement.

Cause No 7: Weak Link Profile

A strong link profile, one that has quality over quantity concerning the sources of the backlinks is a strong contributor to SEO success. A weak link profile with bad-quality or spammy backlinks will, in turn, hurt your rankings.

A poor link profile can reduce positions in engine searches, which will reduce branded SEO traffic levels.

Ways to Improve Link Profile

• Earn Quality Backlinks: Earn backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites.
• Disavow Spammy Links: Disavow spammy links with Google’s Disavow Tool.
• Relationship building: Get on the radar of industry influencers, network with them and collaborate on content to naturally generate backlinks.

Conclusion

A drop in the traffic of branded SEO is alarming; however, through knowing these possible reasons, the first way to solve it is checking into updates, addressing technical SEO issues, staying competitive, taking care of brand reputation, adapting to changes in user behaviour, making sure of good content quality, and assuring a firm and strong profile. Definitely, it leads to the mitigation and less impact of the fall in traffic and keeps the brand alive and vibrant in an online state.

Whitehat Agency delves deep into all the intricacies involved in the world of SEO and digital marketing in order to make a difference. Should there be a fall in your branded SEO traffic, let our experts get in touch with finding out what really is behind the scenes and applying effective solutions. Contact us now to inquire about how we can assist you with your SEO campaign.