Fintech SEO Traffic Drop: A Diagnosis Teardown [2024 Update]
This fintech case study is a deep dive into a real-world scenario faced by a Series D Indian startup.
They experienced a sharp drop in SEO traffic in October 2023. From ~1.5M to 0.7M visitors / month.
We’ll discover how to diagnose the root cause of traffic drops and how to recover.
Context
AUM, Assets Under Management of this Fintech have grown rapidly since a few years.
Source: Mint
Inorganic growth in this context was driven through acquisition of mutual fund distributors.
That’s a great growth strategy.
But relying on 1, inorganic growth channel is risky.
Diversification is key not just for investments, but also for growth marketing channels.
Image Source: Napkin Finance
The leadership did start investing in SEO in 2019.
SEO is considered a smart way to diversify inorganic growth channels.
The decision was right. But the compounding was broken in October 2023.
Diagnosing the Drop
1. Check Top Keywords
A. Go to “Organic Keywords” Report in Ahrefs
B. Change comparison date to date before the drop e.g. 14th Oct 2023
C. Export top 1000 keywords data to sheets
2. Find Top Losers
- Check the column “Traffic Change”
- Sort by lowest to highest
- Now you can see which pages lost maximum traffic
3. Find Patterns
A. Create a Pivot Table of pages data
B. Find common elements of traffic losers
C. I use conditional formatting to see what sticks out — E.g. 41% is much lower than others
4. Build Hypothesis
A. Write down hypothesis a. Is max drop in 1 URL subfolder? b. Are the referring domains abnormally high? c. …
5. Validate Hypothesis
A. Is max drop in 1 URL subfolder?
Right now, traffic loss seems spread across subfolders…
B. Are the referring domains abnormally high?
Seems top loser pages have higher than average # of referring domains
6. Verify the Root Cause
A. What’s common among these referring domains?
B. We’ll pick the top loser i.e. “best US stocks to buy” page
C. Go to the ‘Referring Domains’ Report in Ahrefs
D. Export data to sheets
E. Color code DR & Traffic of Referring Domains
F. And the answer seems clear…
They’ve got backlinks from irrelevant websites.
This pattern exists across other pages that lost traffic as well.
Out of the 4k+ Referring Domains, 87%+ had negligible traffic…
7. Solutions
A. Invest more time in problem diagnosis
B. Solutions are often simpler e.g. a. Add the list of links to a “Disavow” file and upload to Google Search Console b. Check Google’s guidelines:
And that’s a short summary of how to diagnose the root cause of traffic drop using data analysis.
Before You Go
SEO is a powerful growth channel.
It’s often the channel that pays dividends for years.
Sustainable growth is about finding the right balance of harvesting the present and investing in the future.
I’m still learning daily, and I certainly don’t know everything. But I can give you my perspective on any questions you have on growth at venture backed startups.
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