Two men are standing on opposite sides of a river.

The current is strong and there are no bridges, stones, fallen trees or other ways to get across.

The first man shouts to the second man, “How do I get to the other side of the river?”

The second man shouts back, “You are on the other side of the river!”

Perspective matters.

The issue of perspective came up the other day when consulting with a small biz owner. We’ll call her Alice Well.

Alice does a good job tracking organic traffic to her website.

She uses Google Analytics. She also uses a rank tracker (for her, it’s SEMRush) to keep tabs on keyword rankings for her site.

But Alice Well reached out because, when looking at her organic traffic year over year, all was not well.

In fact, she was flat-out confused by what she was seeing.

Her rankings looked great.

Most at least held steady over the last year, with some key search terms even climbing nicely up the Google rankings.

However, organic traffic to her website dropped 11% year over year.

Alice wanted to know what she was missing. What was she doing wrong?

How could rankings rise but organic traffic be down?

Couple o’ reasons. And, spoiler alert, it’s not cuz of anything Alice did wrong.

If you notice a similar thing happening with your organic traffic (assuming there’s been no big rankings drop for a few key search terms), there are two likely culprits:

1. Trends in Search Traffic

One of the first things I looked at with Alice was Google Trends data.

Google Trends is a free tool Google offers that shows the popularity of search queries over time.

Using Trends, you can look at historical data to see if there are seasonal rises or drops in the search volume for a keyword.

For example, every year, you’ll see a huge spike in popularity for the term “Christmas trees” starting the beginning of November and lasting until the end of December.

You can also see if the popularity of a search term is rising or falling over time.

For example, there was a massive drop in searches for “Caribbean cruise” in March 2020, when COVID-19 hit. This year, as more people are traveling again, Google Trends shows a rise in that search term’s popularity.

For Alice Well, it turns out Google Trends shed some light on her mystery of increasing rankings but falling traffic.

Alice’s business sells products that aren’t essential items. They’re things people tend to buy with disposable income.

With purse strings tightening in 2022, there was a clear drop in the popularity of key search terms related to her biz.

I’ve seen this in other markets too.

For example, when the pandemic hit, a lot of people went crazy buying things for their homes. This caused a spike in searches for furniture, landscaping and other home-related items starting in March 2020.

This year, however, search volumes for many home-related goods have dropped to pre-pandemic levels (if not lower).

Lesson here… Alice didn’t do anything wrong when it came to SEO. She just needed to shift her perspective to understand what the real issue was: changing search trends.

But it’s not just trends in search patterns that can affect the “rankings up, traffic down” issue. Which brings us to culprit #2…

2. Google Search Results Page Changes

Google’s always messing with the look of its search results page. It’s just what they do.

Remember the good ol’ days when the search results were pretty simple?

There were a few ads at the top and then a wall of organic listings hit you smack in the face.

Not no more, Sparky!

For many searches, there’s such a mish-mash of results on Google, it’s beginning to look like a ransom note made with cutout magazine letters.

Shopping ads. Text ads. Structured snippets (such as the “People also ask” results). The map/Places listings for local businesses. More Shopping ads. YouTube videos.

Then, buried in the middle of this mess, you’ll find some organic rankings.

There are just fewer of them these days and they no longer steal the show.

What this means is, even if you’re rankings look great, fewer eyeballs are finding your organic rankings and fewer people are clicking through to your site.

The End of SEO??

I’ll get to the punchline here… NO!

This does not mean SEO is dead. Not by a long shot.

Organic traffic is still super valuable and can send a deluge of high-quality traffic to your site.

You just have to understand the game is changing and adjust.

It may mean you need to focus on creating content (Structured Snippets, YouTube videos, etc.) to help your site capture more eyeballs for your key search terms.

It may mean supplementing your SEO efforts with PPC to defend your turf. (Even if it’s just on a few super important search terms for your biz.)

Or it may mean just staying the course, knowing that even though overall traffic may be dropping, if rankings are going up, your SEO efforts are working.

In fact, you may want to expand your efforts to target more keywords your prospects are searching for.

But what do you NOT want to do?

Assume that because organic traffic is dropping, your SEO efforts are failing.

Because with the proper perspective, you may actually find all is well with your SEO strategy.

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