We analyzed the natural visitors development of 1,600 SaaS corporations to find the search engine optimisation methods that work finest in 2024…
…and people who work the worst.
On this article, we’re trying on the corporations that misplaced the best quantity of estimated natural visitors, 12 months over 12 months.
- We analyzed 1,600 SaaS corporations and used the Ahrefs API to tug estimated month-to-month natural visitors information for August 2023 and August 2024.
- Corporations had been ranked by estimated month-to-month natural visitors loss as a proportion of their beginning visitors.
- We’ve filtered out visitors loss brought on by web site migrations and URL redirects and set a minimal beginning visitors threshold of 10,000 month-to-month natural pageviews.
It is a checklist of the SaaS corporations that had the best estimated month-to-month natural visitors loss from August 2023 to August 2024.
Sidenote.
Our natural visitors metrics are estimates, and never essentially reflective of the corporate’s precise visitors (solely they know that). Visitors loss just isn’t at all times unhealthy, and there are many explanation why corporations might select to delete pages and sacrifice key phrase rankings.
| Rank | Firm | Change | Month-to-month Natural Visitors 2023 | Month-to-month Natural Visitors 2024 | Visitors Loss |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Causal | -99.52% | 307,158 | 1,485 | -305,673 |
| 2 | Contently | -97.16% | 276,885 | 7,866 | -269,019 |
| 3 | Datanyze | -95.46% | 486,626 | 22,077 | -464,549 |
| 4 | BetterCloud | -94.14% | 42,468 | 2,489 | -39,979 |
| 5 | Ricotta Trivia | -91.46% | 193,713 | 16,551 | -177,162 |
| 6 | Colourbox | -85.43% | 67,883 | 9,888 | -57,995 |
| 7 | Tabnine | -84.32% | 160,328 | 25,142 | -135,186 |
| 8 | AppFollow | -83.72% | 35,329 | 5,753 | -29,576 |
| 9 | Serverless | -80.61% | 37,896 | 7,348 | -30,548 |
| 10 | UserGuiding | -80.50% | 115,067 | 22,435 | -92,632 |
| 11 | Hopin | -79.25% | 19,581 | 4,064 | -15,517 |
| 12 | Author | -78.32% | 2,460,359 | 533,288 | -1,927,071 |
| 13 | NeverBounce by ZoomInfo | -77.91% | 552,780 | 122,082 | -430,698 |
| 14 | ZoomInfo | -76.11% | 5,192,624 | 1,240,481 | -3,952,143 |
| 15 | Sakari | -73.76% | 27,084 | 7,106 | -19,978 |
| 16 | Frase | -71.39% | 83,569 | 23,907 | -59,662 |
| 17 | LiveAgent | -70.03% | 322,613 | 96,700 | -225,913 |
| 18 | Scoro | -70.01% | 51,701 | 15,505 | -36,196 |
| 19 | accessiBe | -69.45% | 111,877 | 34,177 | -77,700 |
| 20 | Olist | -67.51% | 204,298 | 66,386 | -137,912 |
| 21 | Hevo Knowledge | -66.96% | 235,427 | 77,781 | -157,646 |
| 22 | TextGears | -66.68% | 19,679 | 6,558 | -13,121 |
| 23 | Unbabel | -66.40% | 45,987 | 15,450 | -30,537 |
| 24 | Courier | -66.03% | 35,300 | 11,992 | -23,308 |
| 25 | G2 | -65.74% | 4,397,226 | 1,506,545 | -2,890,681 |
For every of the highest 5 corporations, I ran a five-minute evaluation utilizing Ahrefs Website Explorer to grasp what might have prompted their visitors decline.
Doable explanations embrace Google penalties, programmatic search engine optimisation, and AI content material.
| Causal | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | P.c change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Natural visitors | 307,158 | 1,485 | -305,673 | -99.52% |
| Natural pages | 5,868 | 547 | -5,321 | -90.68% |
| Natural key phrases | 222,777 | 4,023 | -218,754 | -98.19% |
| Key phrases in high 3 | 8,969 | 26 | -8943 | -99.71% |
Causal is a finance platform for startups. They misplaced an estimated 99.52% of their natural visitors on account of a Google guide penalty:
This story may sound acquainted. Causal grew to become internet-famous for an “search engine optimisation heist” that noticed them clone a competitor’s sitemap and use generative AI to publish 1,800 low-quality articles like this:
Google caught wind and promptly issued a guide penalty. Causal misplaced a whole bunch of rankings and a whole bunch of 1000’s of pageviews, just about in a single day:
Because the Ahrefs search engine optimisation Toolbar exhibits, the offending weblog posts are actually 301 redirected to the corporate’s (now significantly better, way more human-looking) weblog homepage:
| Contently | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | P.c change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Natural visitors | 276,885 | 7,866 | -269,019 | -97.16% |
| Natural pages | 32,752 | 1,121 | -31,631 | -96.58% |
| Natural key phrases | 94,706 | 12,000 | -82,706 | -87.33% |
| Key phrases in high 3 | 1,874 | 68 | -1,806 | -96.37% |
Contently is a content material advertising platform. They misplaced 97% of their estimated natural visitors by eradicating 1000’s of user-generated pages.
Nearly the entire web site’s visitors loss appears to stem from deindexing the subdomains used to host their members’ writing portfolios:
A fast Google seek for “contently author portfolios” means that the corporate made the deliberate resolution to deindex all author portfolios by default, and solely relist them as soon as they’ve been manually vetted and authorized:
We will see that these portfolio subdomains are actually 302 redirected again to Contently’s homepage:
And looking out on the key phrase rankings Contently misplaced within the course of, it’s straightforward to guess why this alteration was needed. It seems to be just like the free portfolio subdomains had been being abused to advertise CBD gummies and pirated films:
| Datanyze | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | P.c change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Natural visitors | 486,626 | 22,077 | -464,549 | -95.46% |
| Natural pages | 1,168,889 | 377,142 | -791,747 | -67.74% |
| Natural key phrases | 2,565,527 | 712,270 | -1,853,257 | -72.24% |
| Key phrases in high 3 | 7,475 | 177 | -7,298 | -97.63% |
Datanyze offers contact information for gross sales prospecting. They misplaced 96% of their estimated natural visitors, probably on account of programmatic content material that Google has since deemed too low high quality to rank.
Trying on the Website Construction report in Ahrefs, we are able to see over 80% of the web site’s natural visitors loss is remoted to the /corporations and /folks subfolders:
Taking a look at a number of the pages in these subfolders, it seems to be like Datanyze constructed 1000’s of programmatic touchdown pages to assist promote the folks and firms the corporate presents information for:
Consequently, the vast majority of Datanyze’s dropped key phrase rankings are names of individuals and firms:
Many of those pages nonetheless return 200 HTTP standing codes, and a Google website search nonetheless exhibits a whole bunch of listed pages:
On this case, not the entire programmatic pages have been deleted—as a substitute, it’s attainable that Google has determined to rerank these pages into a lot decrease positions and drop them from most SERPs.
| BetterCloud | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | P.c change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Natural visitors | 42,468 | 2,489 | -39,979 | -94.14% |
| Natural pages | 1,643 | 504 | -1,139 | -69.32% |
| Natural key phrases | 107,817 | 5,806 | -102,011 | -94.61% |
| Key phrases in high 3 | 1,550 | 32 | -1,518 | -97.94% |
Bettercloud is a SaaS spend administration platform. They misplaced 94% of their estimated natural visitors across the time of Google’s November Core Replace:
Trying on the High Pages report for BetterCloud, a lot of the visitors loss may be traced again to a now-deleted /academy subfolder:
The pages within the subfolder are actually deleted, however through the use of Ahrefs’ Web page Examine function, it’s attainable to take a look at a snapshot of a number of the pages’ HTML content material.
This brief, extraordinarily generic article on “How one can Delete an Undesirable Web page in Google Docs” seems to be so much like primary AI-generated content material:
That is the kind of content material that Google has been eager to demote from the SERPs.
Given the timing of the web site’s visitors drop (a small decline after the October core replace, and a precipitous decline after the November core replace), it’s attainable that Google demoted the positioning after an AI content material era experiment.
| Ricotta Trivia | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | P.c change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Natural visitors | 193,713 | 16,551 | -177,162 | -91.46% |
| Natural pages | 218 | 231 | 13 | 5.96% |
| Natural key phrases | 83,988 | 37,640 | -46,348 | -55.18% |
| Key phrases in high 3 | 3,124 | 275 | -2,849 | -91.20% |
Ricotta Trivia is a Slack add-on that gives icebreakers and team-building video games. They misplaced an estimated 91% of their month-to-month natural visitors, probably due to skinny content material and poor on-page expertise on their weblog.
Trying on the Website Construction report, 99.7% of the corporate’s visitors loss is remoted to the /weblog subfolder:
Digging into the Natural key phrases report, we are able to see that the web site has misplaced a whole bunch of first-page rankings for high-volume key phrases like get to know you questions, humorous workforce names, and query of the day:
Whereas these key phrases appear strongly associated to the corporate’s core enterprise, the article content material itself appears very skinny—and the web page is roofed with intrusive promoting banners and pop-ups (a typical speculation for why some websites had been negatively impacted by current Google updates):
The location appears to point out a small restoration on the again of the August 2024 core replace—so there could also be hope but.
Last ideas
All the information for this text comes from Ahrefs. Wish to analysis your rivals in the identical approach? Take a look at Website Explorer.
