Technical SEO issues impact both on ranking and organic traffic

SEO admin 21 February 2020 Reading time : 3 minutes

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Having a solid, healthy and stable website that works well in Google search and brings organic traffic is a goal for all those who have an online activity, and who reads the insights of our blog knows by now that there are multiple factors that can contribute to the achievement of this goal. From the United States today comes a case study that makes us address the topic of technical SEO and how errors on the site can influence its performance.

A case study directly from the United States

It all started from the publishing of the TechTarget’s financial report, a business-to-business marketing company based in Newton, Massachusetts, relating to the 2019 fourth quarter: in conjunction with a period of fluctuations on Google (of smaller entity compared to the broad core update, as we were saying in our recap piece on 2019 Google updates), the company had a decrease of 25% in organic traffic and also a reduction in profits.

A drop in traffic for TechTarget

In the last trimester last year the organic and unpaid traffic of TechTarget site “represented 94% of total traffic”, but in November Google algorithm “seemed to treat our original copyrighted content and our older content base differently, with a 25% decrease”.

A technical SEO problem

According to the company’s managers, it was “a problem of techincal SEO and we are testing some modifications correlated to it”, which optimistically suggest that improvements can be seen in the short time.

The official claim of the company and financial assessment

Organic traffic is a crucial channel to TechTarget because it is “one of the main reasons that we operate at 76% gross margin and have so much operating leverage in our model, unlike many internet businesses whose traffic acquisition costs increase linearly with revenue”. The real surprise was that on many previous updates the corporate site reacted well and “our high-quality contents have always been rewarded” by the algorithm’s updates.

To complete the financial part of the talk, the US company’s statement highlights that “unlike many consumer internet models, the amount of our organic traffic is not directly correlated to our revenue, as evidenced by our Q4 2019 results”. The report goes on saying that “while traffic increases are preferable, future improvements in traffic would not directly increase our revenue”, given the fact that the revenue stream related the most to the actual website’s traffic is represented by branding product, that are worth “approximately 15% of our overall revenue”.

From a financial perspective, then, TechTarget’s strategy “has always been premium pricing, which by design, results in unsold inventory, so we have not seen an impact in these revenues due to traffic”.

The explanation of executives

To better clarify the problem and address the technical SEO issues identified as responsible for the collapse on Google, Barry Schwartz on SearchEngineLand interviewed Don Hawk, Executive Director and Co-Founder of TechTarget, anticipating that he is not an SEO expert and therefore provides general answers on the strategies of the company in order to invert the decrease of traffic.

Tre areas of intervention so to retrieve organic traffic

Techtarget’s attention is focused on three areas: the member protection section of the site, the management of old contents and changes to the architecture of the site and, lastly, the speed of the pages to ensure a quick and positive experience for users.

In the first case, the site allows access to some contents only to those who have a registered account: Don Hawk tells that there have been numerous implementations of the restricted areas and, potentially, Google may have reacted negatively to these interventions. Although preferring “members over traffic”, at this stage the company is still testing further changes to protected areas in order to study possible impacts on ranking and traffic.

Like most sites, TechTarget has been producing a lot of contents for years and is currently managing a large database: now the technical team is testing how to update these pages so to improve Google’s organic traffic and, technically speaking, is studying solutions to the architecture of the site to change the way it presents these old contents to the search engine.

In short, the American company is struggling with issues rather common if not daily for all those who work online: I have suffered a decrease in organic traffic, what is it depending on? And how should I react?