2020 has been a bit mad for all of us so far.
When it comes to SEO, the impact of COVID-19 has seen the industry respond with its own pandemic in the form of record levels of round-up blog posts that have spread across the SERPs at breakneck speed. These have been everything from “how to approach COVID-19 with SEO” to “what should SEOs do to tackle COVID-19”.
Despite what some of the titles may look like, I’m sure that their respective authors are not suggesting for one second that SEOs or the SEO industry in general should be at the forefront of tackling the pandemic. Even the SEO celebs know to leave that to the science experts.
At the time of writing, we’ve also just weathered another storm in the form of the Google May 2020 Core Update. This has seen the aforementioned round-up posts go into an even more heightened state of frenzy.
My snarkiness at the round-up post deluge aside, the double whammy of a major Google update amid a once in a lifetime global pandemic and subsequent recession does in all seriousness present a tough time for SEOs. This includes the inevitable traffic, conversion and ranking fluctuations which in turn requires a huge amount of guts and guile when identifying and reporting on real issues, drop-offs and potential solutions amid the furore.
Putting the snarkiness aside once more, there are of course useful insights smattered within some of these blog posts. Moz actually wrote quite a measured, thoughtful piece on how to diagnose traffic drops and make sense of what’s going on amid all of this.
In this post I want to continue this general theme and dive into some useful SEO reporting tips for the COVID-19 era, and to some degree the Google update. This is intended to attempt to calm nerves and try to steer the ship in the general direction of the bigger picture.
Brand/Non-Brand/Content/Category Analysis
It can be easy to make vast assumptions when seeing traffic hits caused by algo updates and the everyday global pandemic. One assumption made by some is that they’re site-wide and things are looking like they’re hurtling towards an inevitable slump.
When struck with this, consider delving into areas such as content types and branded and non-branded traffic views to see what’s really going on. Apply some filters and investigate what’s happening to your pages that actually matter. Also, cross-reference your various SEO tools and reporting resources as much as possible to get to the bottom of things.
Optimistic Doomsday Scenario 1
Optimistic Doomsday Scenario 2
(After the first week of core update).
“Hmmm. Maybe let’s wait and see then? Could this be us moving toward the holy grail of better quality traffic?!”
This may well be a potentially patronising (sorry) reminder to apply the basic practice of analysing your immediate data on a more granular level to get closer to the truth. However, it’s a good thing to keep this thought process in mind and delve into the data instead of getting caught up in the madness. This should be a quick go-to if you’ve got trigger-happy clients or internal stakeholders who maybe need appeasing.
What you really should be doing if you see shifts in rankings and traffic in some areas and not others (but are maybe enjoying overall sustained SEO revenue) is CHECKING YOUR LOG FILES FOR ANOMALIES. This is particularly recommended after a major Google update.
(Sadly not-so-obvious disclaimer: I’m not saying that things like traffic drops and ranking falls should be ignored. Please don’t ignore them. This is more to do with finding ways to alleviate the temptation to hit the panic button).
Inevitable Bigger Picture Stuff
It’s easy to get caught up in the moment and focus purely on the now with regards to what’s happening on the site. It’s been a said aplenty and needs saying again: these are unprecedented times within unprecedented times within unprecedented times.
The here and now is important, though if you’re dealing with difficult questions on performance and are being probed for solutions in a volatile environment, consider honing in on some degree of relativity.
Have a look back. What was traffic like up until lockdown? What was the trajectory looking like running up until the pandemic/Google update/insert crisis moment? Are there any previous forecasting models that can be revisited, refined and adapted to paint a more positive story?
From a COVID-19 standpoint, we are in the UK (at the time of writing) 9 weeks (I think?) into lockdown where the initial SEO shockwave may have settled, for better or for worse. If you’re in a position to, have a look at comparison scenarios like year on year performance and projections going into Q3 and Q4. Moz mention seasonality in their piece too and this is also valid.
Final Thoughts: What Else Have You Been Up To?
Many people in the industry have offered up points on why SEO is more important than ever during these scary times. Time will tell on that one. It’s a good idea however to remind ourselves of the value of SEO and bring things back to the importance of your day to day SEO best practice.
Before the world went wrong and skewed your traffic and rankings, were there any milestones you pushed through in the form of a big content piece or major technical fix? If you can isolate localised gains as a result of these that cut through the scary stuff, then by all means shout about these in your reporting.
There’s also a chance that certain technical fixes may have even contributed to the affiliated COVID-19/Google traffic hits. No I don’t think you’re an idiot that went rogue on your robots.txt file. I’m talking about things like large scale de-indexation projects to remove spammy URLs, or recent submissions of disavow files. Like many technical SEO ventures, they’re informed by the desire to increase the quality of your traffic and crawl budget, though may in the short term see a drop off of overall traffic that you were receiving from undesirable resources.
I appreciate that scenarios where things sometimes seem actually okay-ish may sound a bit glib if that isn’t the reality. These are more pointers if you’re looking for quick and easy methods for alternate ways of reporting that may help if the data is within reach.
Regardless, I hope these SEO reporting tips are useful. I also hope that with my crisis-agnostic blog title you don’t deem me a hypocrite for offloading on the round-up blog-inclined types earlier on.