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How would you respond to this question?
I recently had an interview for a head of content role at a SaaS company.
The interviewer (the head of growth), quite rightly, grilled me a bit. One of his questions was.
“So what would be your response when you see the traffic decrease significantly for the month, say by 30%? How would you go about addressing that problem?”
It feels like he wants me to be more of a head of SEO rather than just head of content but I gave him a couple of responses anyway.
Still, I’m curious, how would you have gone about answering that question?
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1 Reply
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1) Check for seasonality. Is the decrease because of seasonality / less searches overall, or a particular reason?
2) Check for the affected pages. Why are they driving less traffic? Did they lose ranking, or is it something else.
3) Dive deep for the pages that lost ranking. Analyze possible reasons. Did competitors push better content? Do competitors have better backlinks? We’re competitors featured on media recently / got an influx of a lot of backlinks?
4) Come up with an action plan. Overhaul old content, run a digital PR campaign, build backlinks to key pages, improve internal linking structure, etc.
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I take action using data backed solutions. First step would be analyze the data.
Is this regular for the month? Ie sessonality?
Which touchpoints are down? Is it overall, or is it a specific traffic source? Has a new piece of content caused controversy? Or is this a SERP ranking change?
If the traffic decline is due to ranking we need to know if something on our content has gone wrong. Or if a competitor has created better content or backlink gamed us.
If it’s, say, a 30% decline attributed to social media traffic, we need to evaluate the content coming from social media. There must be a gap in message or a deviation from what we’ve been doing, for there to be such a large variation here. Is content being published on social or did it stop for the month? Does the content allow an easy navigation to the website?
Once you’ve identified the key areas causing this. Create a strategy that will recover the traffic and prevent such an error from happening again.
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“i would do seo” would be my response. that is a very vague question and even as a full time seo i would be caught a bit off guard with that question without any additional context to go off of.
however, generally here is what i’d look for, in this order:
* id start by diagnosing the specific pages /keywords that took a hit. hopefully it would be attributed to a blog article or 2, but if it was the money pages and/or on a site level, then that would be a bigger reason for concern
* Once i knew the affected pages, I would look for some major issues that can lead to traffic tanks:
* 404’s (did someone change a url without properly redirecting?)
* Manual action (super rare and not likely the case, but takes 2 seconds to check for peace of mind)
* major UX issues. briefly check each or the majority of the site pages on both mobile and desktop to make sure they are loading and formatted correctly. For example, is a page’s layout jacked up on Mobile (that’s happened to me before – set huge padding for desktop which ended up displaying 1-2 letters per line on mobile)
* Look at GSC errors. lots of those “errors” should be taken with a grain of salt, but it is also your best friend for finding/diagnosing major technical issues
* Once i checked those 2 major things, id zoom out to see if it was due to any of these 3 things that would allow me to “pass the buck” a little bit
* competition – who surpassed me in rankings and why? a new site maybe? a site that is ramping up their SEO?
* any recent google updates? is it normal volatility?
* any possible reporting errors?
* EDIT: u/DrJigsaw’s great point about seasonality also fits nicely into this section
* After that, i’d do a deeper dive into SEO fundamentals and the current strategy. Was this site pursuing an aggressive black/gray hat strategy that finally caught up to them? specifically, id look at
* content quality
* backlink quality
* site technicals/UX
* If none of this diagnosing presented an answer (because Google is a fickle b*tch) then i’d chalk it up to normal volatility and/or just a basic sign that it’s time to step up / clean up the SEO game with an improved strategy that focuses on user intent & experience, EEAT, good links, etc. etc. And i’d keep a laser eye on performance and respond accordingly
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