SEO and content have been key to our growth over the last few years. We’ve invested in various SEO strategies (driven by me, not through an agency or outside provider) to drive qualified traffic and sales inquiries to EditorNinja. In short, it’s worked pretty well, or at least it seemed like it did until August.
When this happened, I kind of shrugged (after the initial pit in my stomach) because I knew most of this traffic was very top-of-funnel informational traffic targeted at writers and editors, with the idea that if we build a big audience, then we just need a fraction of those who eventually hire us to build a very good (and big) business. I still believe in this strategy, by the way.
I stopped doing full-time SEO work a while ago to focus on building EditorNinja and the team that supports it. I give this context because I may have missed some articles about the August SEO update, which saw decreased organic traffic for many websites, including mine.
I recently made a discovery that makes me question what really happened in August, and I want to present the discovery here. I’ve looked for people to corroborate and disprove my theory, and I’ve only found people who corroborate it, so I feel comfortable publishing this article.
That said, if you saw a reduction in organic traffic in August that was not primarily mobile traffic, I’d love to see it.
This has been a weird year for agencies, including EditorNinja, and their lead generation activities. Many of us saw a great start to the year, a slow spring, a weirdly strong July and August, and then very low lead volume until now (mid-October). That’s been true for EditorNinja and the other agency owners I’ve spoken with about it, so it’s broader than just us.
So I didn’t think much of the traffic loss until a few days ago when I saw a self-described travel blogger, Katherine, the creator of The Ordinary Katalog, posting on Threads about how she’s seen a 60% decrease in organic traffic over the past year.
My SEO spidey senses started tingling, even though I was lying in bed before going to sleep.
So I searched “Ubud food guide” on my phone. This is the keyword Katherine (whom I don’t know and have zero affiliation with) targets with this Ubud food guide on her site.
I was shocked at what I saw. Here’s a screen recording of it, and screenshots:
For those of you who didn’t click through, the search engine results page (SERP) is made up of:
- One organic results
- A map and 3 restaurants
- A “People Also Ask” section (4 dropdowns)
- A “Discussions and forums” section with 2 Reddit and 1 Tripadvisor listing
- A “People also search for” section with images of specific restaurants
- Other search query options (5)
- Short videos (from Instagram and YouTube), which open in a modal
- Another “People also search for” with 4 query options, including one saying “Best Restaurants Ubed reddit”
That’s it. Technically, the restaurants, discussions/forums, and short videos are “organic,” but not in the traditional SEO sense.
The desktop search is VERY different:
It’s not an old-school search result, but it’s much closer to what one would expect—a list of organic results with a “Discussions and forums” block and 9 individual restaurants at the top, which I assume Google collected from the various pages also ranked on this page.
Honestly, I was shocked when I saw this result today. It is SO different from the mobile result.
This sent me further down the rabbit hole. And here we are.
Synopsis
Here is a table showing the traffic loss by Device Type (Mobile and Desktop) across the 5 sites I studied below. The takeaway is simple: Sites in the August update saw a much larger Mobile loss than Desktop loss. This was even true for sites pounded over the last 12-18 months by “helpful content” updates.
I do not believe that August’s update was a traditional rankings update. While each site below also saw a reduction in Desktop organic traffic, most of the loss came from mobile devices. The shifts I’ve noticed in mobile SERP layouts and the difference between mobile and desktop SERPs that currently exist lead me to believe that there was a bigger layout shift and core change to how Google displays results that go beyond simple “ranking factors” and “rankings.” In short, August was a fundamental change to how Google works on mobile and not just how they rank websites and pages.
Here’s the table across the websites I’ve looked at.
| Site | Mobile Clicks (July) | Mobile Clicks (October | Mobile Clicks Difference | Desktop Clicks (July) | Desktop Clicks (October) | Desktop Clicks Difference | Mobile Percentage Difference | Desktop Percentage Difference | |
| EditorNinja | 4,496 | 2,784 | -1,712 | 3,469 | 2,502 | -967 | -38.08% | -27.88% | |
| Anonymous Site | 65,839 | 33,185 | -32,654 | 39,172 | 30,698 | -8,474 | -49.60% | -21.63% | |
| Cubit | 181,360 | 147,726 | -33,634 | 105,046 | 99,017 | -6,029 | -18.55% | -5.74% | |
| The Ordinary Katalog | 5,179 | 2,013 | -3,166 | 2,319 | 872 | -1,447 | -61.13% | -62.40% | |
| The Wayward Home | 2,236 | 594 | -1,642 | 144 | 72 | -72 | -73.43% | -50.00% |
EditorNinja’s Traffic Loss Was More Mobile Than Desktop
As I showed above with the screenshot from Fathom, our analytics tool that I am very happy with, we lost a fair bit of organic traffic in the August update.
Here’s our Search Console screenshot, comparing Desktop and Mobile and the dates of October 1-16 compared to July 2,17, 2024.
For those who can’t see those numbers, here’s how they break down.
Mobile
Here’s how Mobile fared:
- July 2 – July 17, 2024 → 4,496 Clicks, 782,256 Impressions
- October 1 – October 16, 2024 → 2,784 Clicks, 536,049 Impressions
That adds up to 1,712 fewer Clicks and 246,207 fewer Impressions. In short, EditorNinja lost 38.07% of our Mobile Clicks and 31.47% of our Mobile Impressions.
Desktop
Here’s how Desktop fared:
- July 2 – July 17, 2024 → 3,469 Clicks, 514,134 Impressions
- October 1 – October 16, 2024 → 2,502 Clicks, 500,839 Impressions
That adds up to 967 fewer Clicks and 13,295 fewer Impressions. EditorNinja lost 27.88% of our Desktop Clicks and just 2.59% of our Desktop Impressions.
That Click difference is not inconsequential, but it’s much less percentage-wise (and total volume) than Mobile, and the Desktop Impressions barely budged.
This smelled fishy to me, so let’s look at a couple more sites.
So Was This Anonymous Site
This next site comes to us from my industry colleague Anthony Nelson, who owns the site but asked that the actual site URL not be shared. He saw my tweet and responded in my DMs with this screenshot:
For those who can’t see those numbers, here’s how they break down.
Mobile
Here’s how Mobile fared:
- July 2 – July 17, 2024 → 65,839 Clicks, 874,561 Impressions
- October 1 – October 16, 2024 → 33,185 Clicks, 365,272 Impressions
That adds up to 32,654 fewer Clicks and 509,289 fewer Impressions. In short, this site lost 49.54% of its Mobile Clicks and 58.2% of its Mobile Impressions.
Desktop
Here’s how Desktop fared:
- July 2 – July 17, 2024 → 39,172 Clicks, 504,501 Impressions
- October 1 – October 16, 2024 → 30,689 Clicks, 400,165 Impressions
That adds up to 8,483 fewer Clicks and 104,336 fewer Impressions. This site lost 21.6% of its Desktop Clicks and 20.68% of its Desktop Impressions.
That reduction isn’t nothing, of course, but it’s less than half and almost 1/3 of what they saw on Mobile.
Wow.
B2B Census Data SaaS Cubit
Here’s a third site, Cubit, is a SaaS site in the tech space.
They shared this screenshot with me from what I believe is GA4:
For the same dates as the two sites already described, they lost:
- 18.55% of their organic Mobile traffic
- 5.74% of their organic Desktop traffic
Like the other two sites, they lost a higher percentage of mobile traffic, which was also the highest driver of traffic. They lost ~34,000 visitors on Mobile and ~6,000 on Desktop.
The Ordinary Katalog
Katherine’s Asia travel blog was the site that started me down this rabbit hole, and she was awesome enough to agree to take part in this investigation as well. She said on Threads that her site and revenue are down over 60%, which I’ve corroborated with Semrush charts (this is Desktop worldwide):
Katherine supplied me with her Search Console chart from the same date periods as the sites above, and here it is:
Here are the numbers.
Mobile
Here’s how Mobile fared:
- July 2 – July 17, 2024 → 5,179 Clicks, 216,463 Impressions
- October 1 – October 16, 2024 → 2,013 Clicks, 100,512 Impressions
That adds up to 3,166 fewer Clicks and 115,591 fewer Impressions. In short, this site lost 61.13% of its Mobile Clicks and 53.4% of its Mobile Impressions.
Wow.
Desktop
Here’s how Desktop fared:
- July 2 – July 17, 2024 → 2,319 Clicks, 71,917 Impressions
- October 1 – October 16, 2024 → 872 Clicks, 39,444 Impressions
That adds up to 1,447 fewer Clicks and 32,473 fewer Impressions. This site lost 62.4% of its Desktop Clicks and 45.15% of its Desktop Impressions.
So, Desktop saw a similar drop in traffic (off a much smaller base of traffic) and a smaller drop (45.15% as opposed to 53.4% on mobile) in Impressions.
The Wayward Home
The Wayward Home is a travel site discussing van life, life on the road, nomadic living and working, and similar themes. To be candid, my wife and I would be great friends with Kristin and her partner!
Kristin posted these statistics on Threads:
– Before the Google update: 179,000 sessions August 2023
– After the Google update: 5,100 sessions August of 2024
– 97.15% drop in traffic from Google
This site has been losing traffic for a while, so I wondered what they saw with the August update.
Here’s the Search Console screenshot that Kristin shared with me via Instagram DM:
Mobile
Here’s how Mobile fared:
- July 2 – July 17, 2024 → 2,236 Clicks, 43,014 Impressions
- October 1 – October 16, 2024 → 594 Clicks, 13,376 Impressions
That adds up to 1,624 fewer Clicks and 29,638 fewer Impressions. In short, this site lost 72.62% of its Mobile Clicks and 68.9% of its Mobile Impressions.
Wow.
Desktop
Here’s how Desktop fared:
- July 2 – July 17, 2024 → 144 Clicks, 25,145 Impressions
- October 1 – October 16, 2024 → 72 Clicks, 23,308 Impressions
That adds up to 72 fewer Clicks and 1,837 fewer Impressions. This site lost a further 50% of its Desktop Clicks, but just 7.3% of its Desktop Impressions.
This site has unfortunately been DECIMATE by Google in the continuous “helpful content” updates, but even with that, they still saw much more Mobile Clicks loss than Desktop.
What Really Happened in August?
I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I like to base my reality off provable or disprovable facts.
The examples I’ve seen thus far are proving out my theory, though.
Something definitely happened with SEO and desktop traffic in August, to be sure. All three of the sites shown lost some, if not significant, desktop Clicks and Impressions (where I could get them).
But something MUCH bigger happened on mobile. EditorNinja and the bottom example are both B2B, the other two are consumer-focused.
My theory, which I’m going with until I’m shown enough examples that disprove it, is that an SEO update definitely happened in August but it also coincided with not a usual ranking shift, but a mobile search result layout shift, which dramatically decreased clickthroughs and impressions on mobile for many sites.
To put it bluntly, it’s not that you or I or anyone really did something wrong. It’s that the rules of the game shifted under our feet as we were playing, and now we have to figure out what those new rules are and start playing by them, while hoping that our time in the penalty box (not literally as in an SEO penalty. It’s an analogy, folks) doesn’t last so long that we’re not able to enter or stay in the game again.
