I’ve had a fascinating traffic drop assessment case of a medium-sized e-commerce website, says Olga Zarr.
At first, it seemed pretty obvious – the drop happened at the exact same time as the March 2024 Core and Spam Updates.
But as I dug deeper into the data, the real reason behind the drop blew my mind…
The website, which shows products but doesn’t let you buy them directly, saw a huge 20% drop in traffic on March 4th, according to Google Search Console.
I double-checked with Ahrefs and Semrush, and they showed the same thing – lost keywords and rankings all over the place.
Bing organic traffic stayed exactly the same, so it couldn’t be a technical SEO issue…
I put on my detective hat and started my usual investigation:
— I went through every page that lost traffic, focusing on the ones that got hit the hardest.
— I checked all the lost keywords and compared where they used to rank to where they rank now.
— I analyzed SERP changes super carefully, looking for any patterns or weird stuff that could explain the drop.
— I compared GA4 and GSC traffic data to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.
The homepage got hit the hardest, especially for branded keywords, which was a big red flag.
Branded keyword rankings stayed the same, which made the whole thing even more confusing.
Product pages had smaller losses, but they added up to a big overall drop.
Most of the lost keywords weren’t even relevant, and a lot of the rankings that dropped were already pretty low to begin with.
I turned to a bunch of SEO tools to back up what I found, but they didn’t give me a clear answer.
I wasn’t about to give up, so I dove into GSC’s Performance report and started playing with the “Product snippets” and “Merchant listings” filters.
Pages with Product snippets lost the most traffic, but since all the pages had Product Schema, it wasn’t a smoking gun.
I double and triple-checked the schema and rich results, but everything looked good.
Then, it hit me – I needed to get into the Google Merchant Center.
And there it was, staring me right in the face.
The site had got a warning about being removed from the Merchant Center because they don’t directly sell products.
Here’s the kicker: The removal happened on the exact same day as the Core update, which totally threw me off at first.
The SEO lessons from this?
— Look into every possibility, even if it seems totally unlikely at first.
— Always, always, always get access to the Google Merchant Center for e-commerce sites.
— Use all the filters in GSC’s Performance report, especially the “Search appearance” one.
— Remember that GSC data is sampled and filtered, which can make your analysis harder.
— Trust your gut and keep digging if something doesn’t feel right.
