What to Do if Your eCom Brands Organic Traffic is Stagnant (with Examples)

Organic search remains an essential acquisition channel to build a strong and enduring eCommerce brand. However, organic growth is certainly not a given and even if your other channels are thriving, you may find your organic growth stagnant.

Whether your efforts have been concentrated on paid channels and you want to build a larger baseline or you simply want to diversify your customer acquisition knowing why your organic traffic hasn't been growing and where to focus your efforts to change this is an essential first step.

In this article, we’ll run through exactly what you need to focus on to change your organic traffic from stagnant to thriving.

Identify Which Areas Are Your Limiting Factors for Growth

Technical SEO - Issues vs. Opportunities

Technical SEO is the foundation of any website looking to grow their organic traffic and can fall under two groups: issues and opportunities.

Issues are actions that are actively limiting your brands growth due to making the site, or important features of the site, unavailable to search engines. Opportunities on the other hand are additions or optimisations to enhance your technical SEO. Generally speaking, the more flexible your CMS is, the more likely you’ll have issues to fix - this is more common for headless CMS. Sites on Shopify tend to have less issues, but also more opportunities to expand their setup for growth. Therefore, even if you believe your site is technically sound, there may well be room for improvement.

Example 1 - A client came to us having lost organic traffic following a migration. Although it had partially recovered, organic traffic was stagnant for over a year. Following technical recommendations, several technical actions were identified.

• Issue - Large areas of the site were fully reliant on JavaScript rendering to be seen, which is very inefficient 
• Issue - Low value filter pages were crawlable and indexable
• Issue - Key category pages were duplicated and optimised towards the same keywords
• Opportunity - PDP breadcrumbs could be added on mobile across all PDPs

Subsequent implementation to fix these areas has seen significant and sustained improvements for the site.

Identifying which issues are restricting growth and are therefore the highest priority to fix via a technical audit is the first step. Once all actions have been identified they should then be prioritised. At NOVOS, we use the Impact, Confidence, Effort (ICE) framework to prioritise technical fixes.

Content Expertise

For search engines to rank a brand for important transactional terms, it helps if they are seen to be an expert within a given niche. Therefore, building relevant content at each stage of the customer journey is vital to gaining the relative edge over competitors.

If onsite content has never been a priority for your brand, this can lead to organic traffic stagnating - not just from blogs or guides, but to key transactional category and product pages. 

Building hubs of relevant contextual information can support category and product pages to rank. This leads not just to more top-of-funnel potential customers, but also more customers to transactional pages as the perceived expertise of the site increases for search engines. A win win!

Example 2 - One of our clients was new to market in a competitive niche. A key initial strategy for us was to build their customer reach and perceived expertise by ensuring category pages had relevant, contextual information and that these categories were supported by top-of-funnel inspirational content highly relevant to their products, as well as mid-funnel produce and style guides. This grew organic traffic, which has sustained and over time led to high volume category pages ranking (category page traffic increased by over 800% between year 1 & 2 of our strategy).

Links

Authority of Links

Links are not built equally; therefore having a large number of referring domains isn’t the deciding factor for growth. One of our clients was new to the market in Ireland and had far fewer links than market leaders, with over 1000 fewer referring domains. However, breaking these into tiers based on authority (using Domain Rating from Ahrefs) shows they were actually a lot closer to bridging the gap to their competition. 

With a targeted focus on building high authority tier 1 and 2 links at scale, we turned years of stagnant organic traffic into significant growth and gained ground on market leading competitors.

Relevance of Links

A lack of link authority isn’t the only potential limiting factor however; a lack of relevant links to the target brand can also hinder organic progress.

We found this recently for a client in the automotive space; tech was sound, content expertise was high, and their backlink profile was miles ahead (pun intended) of competitors in terms of overall number of links and the authority of those links, however, performance was still struggling. Reviewing links from a number of important and highly relevant publications in this space using our link relevancy tool, we found that competitors in general had a larger proportion of links, suggesting that relevance could indeed be the factor limiting growth.

Recency of Links

Even with a strong and even relevant backlink profile on paper, this isn’t always enough to guarantee organic growth. Despite a very strong historic backlink profile, one of our clients wasn’t seeing organic growth due to the recency of links not increasing (our time was focussed on crucial technical fixes as a priority).

However, we see time and time again how a fresh focus on targeted link acquisition can turn stagnant organic traffic into thriving growth.

Deep Linked Pages

Another factor that can supercharge growth even from a stagnant base is ensuring links are built direct to deeper pages that are ranking for keywords that are priority for your brand to improve for.

We’ve found that even when a backlink profile is strong, relevant and recently built, building links at a page specific level can be the factor that breaks through the growth barrier. One such example can be seen below. This shows the impact of 11 links built directly to a category page, for a high volume keyword (19k/month) in a competitive space; from outside the top 50 to number 1 over a single year of consistent link building. 

How Long for Growth to Occur?

There are many factors to consider when understanding how long it will take to see organic growth, however, analysing the main limiting factors for your brand will help you prioritise and speed up results. Generally speaking, most sites have a combination of elements they can improve so a strategy which applies a focus on all channels is likely to succeed faster than one which focuses on one at a time. However, knowing how to prioritise resources in line with your brands limiting factors for organic growth is the crucial first step.

Ready to grow your organic traffic? Get in touch to find out more about our eCommerce SEO strategies and how it can transform your traffic from stagnant to thriving.