What's Going On with Our Branded Organic Traffic?

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?

Best Tools For Link Building

es! Link building activities and reaching out to web masters for driving new links back to your website can be done easily. There are various great tools that can make the process of link building much easier and much faster for you!

so here I am going to present few tools which can help you to take your link building campaigns to the next level :

•  Majestic SEO: This is a website browser that makes you to see the sites which are linking to your competitor’s pages. It helps you in beating your competitors in the SERPs and in identifying new opportunities to build links to your own site. This tool offers a free report for any site which is under your control and this tool can be useful in ensuring link sources which are already linking back to your website. You just need to upgrade to the paid version to access on the full spectrum of data.

• Open Site Explorer: This tool offers similar features as majestic SEO. Through this tool you would be able to get slightly more information with this program’s free version. You just have to enter your competitors’ websites and then you have to pay attention on their linking domains, anchor test and inbound links. These all will help you informing about your own link building strategy and by updating to the paid version you can even include data on your social shares across twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

 

• Raven Tools: This tool is not cheap as it starts at $99/month but you will definitely get the worth of your expense. This tool allows you to research on the accessible link partners and this will automatically help you in grabbing the webmaster contact information and sending a standard link request message. It is quite easy to navigate.

•  Ahrefs: This tool provides an unprecedented amount of information about a site’s inbound links which consist of each link’s ALR ratings. This tool helps you to easily manage link prospects and it ensures that partners with whom you’re contacting will be beneficial for your site.

•  Link Research Tool: This plan starts at $199/month which is not cheap but yes this tool’s unique programming makes you certain about whether you should concentrate more on branding links or on SEOs. This tool is quite helpful in competing with competitors and analyzing why he has lost rank with in the SERPs.

• SEOMOz PRO : Its not just about link building but it’s a complete SEO management program that facilitates in many activates like on- site optimization practices, social media marketing and link building techniques which you can buy only in $99/month.

• MozBar: This is free tool. It runs on Firefox and chrome extension that displays loads of valuable link prospecting information with in your browser window, like it highlights internal and external links and no-follow v/s follow links that allows you to see which links and keywords are targeting by your competitors.

• Ontolo: It offers comprehensive suite of link research tools for a monthly fee of $97/month like raven and link research tools. This program offers few innovative features like automated link prospecting and enhanced competitors link profiling. It’s a great option for saving your time.

• Market Samurai: This tool is more useful in keyword research but it contains few modules that can be useful for link building activities. Its ‘find content’ module  helps you in tracking down article directories, blogs and other web resources which provides potential link building opportunities and it comes in $149 that is one time investment.

• Tout: This tool helps you in email management which allows automatically extracting contact information from websites and creating new emails and then copy in template message texts with just a single click.

• Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: It’s actually a micro – hiring program completes a number of tasks. Through this tool it becomes possible to automate the process of link building.

• Buzz Stream: This tool offers a comprehensive link management system which includes prospect relationship management, back link tracking and focus on link research. It comes in $30/month. This is a great option for the beginners.