Customers and prospects call me all the time wondering why their traffic is down. They assume it’s something they’ve done (or not done) and they rarely think about outside forces. The idea that you (and you alone) are the cause for traffic reductions is just as silly as believing that you are the cause for the increases. Indeed, you can influence traffic, but any belief that you are the master of your SEO domain is an incomplete version of reality.

There’s a coin-flip chance (or better) that any drop in traffic is likely to correlate with a change in your competitive landscape. Furthermore, you must drill beyond the permafrost to understand causal indicators. Fact: traffic dropped; but traffic from where? It’s important you first isolate the nature of the drop before jumping to any conclusions. Is the drop mostly in organic search referrals? Is the drop mostly from one search engine? Is the drop mostly from a particular portal that always drives visitors to your site? There are dozens and perhaps a hundred causes for traffic dips.

Here are some things you can to do isolate causal effects of traffic or ranking changes - specifically those related to competitive pressure.

1. Search for your preferred key-phrases; note the competitors that rank above you and below you. Repeat this process weekly for a month to understand who is scoring higher and thus pushing you lower. Plot the top twenty positions on a graph; after four weekly measurements you’ll likely see a pattern.
2. Investigate the competitors that flow into the top twenty looking for clues why their content is performing so well for each important key-phrase. Note the page titles and other meta-tags that caused this content to invade your space. You’ll likely see a pattern.
3. Create intelligence channels that focus on these competitors and watch for new product announcements, news, and content items that are likely to put pressure on your own competitive posture. MyST provides automated intelligence-gathering channels to do this, but you can also craft a less-elegant solution with Google Alerts.
4. Compare your social media performance with your website performance to see if both content bodies are experiencing similar loss of traffic. If one is performing better than the other, try to determine the key differences; there’s probably a clue in there.
5. Subscribe to HARO (Help A Reporter Out) and watch for new articles that journalists are working on; get ahead of relevant stories in your industry by creating key-phrase-intensive content in advance of the release of these articles. MyST provides a service called PR-Connect which does this automatically and alerts you to upcoming articles in your industry.

Studying your competitors in terms of traffic is a key performance indicator – don’t assume the problems are related to your site, it’s SEO-ness, or its design.