Is this just normal noise?

[kexej28769@nongnue]

Almost every consultant or in-house SEO will be asked to investigate organic traffic drops at some point. I’ve investigated a lot, so I thought I’d share some of the steps I’ve found helpful when doing so.


Before you sound the alarm and get lost down the rabbit hole, you should make sure that the drop you're seeing is real. This involves answering two questions:

A.) Do you trust the data?
This may seem trivial, but at least a quarter of australia number data traffic drops I've seen were simply due to data issues.

The best way to check this is to examine other metrics that could be affected by data issues. Does anything else look funky? If you have a data engineering team, are they aware of any data issues? Are you missing data for certain days or page types or devices, etc.? Thankfully, data issues will usually make themselves pretty obvious once you start turning over a few rocks.


One of the more common sources of data problems is missing data for just one day.

B.) Is this just normal variation?
Metrics go up and down all the time for no discernible reason. One way to quantify this is to use your historical standard deviation for SEO traffic.