Is SEM killing SEO traffic?

[kexej28769@nongnue]

10. Has the number of referring domains and/or links to you decreased?
It's possible that a large number of your backlinks have been removed or are no longer accessible for whatever reason.

Ahrefs can be a quick way to determine if you australia number data lost backlinks and it also offers very handy reports for your lost backlinks or referring domains that will allow you to identify why you have lost those links .


A sudden drop in backlinks could be because you are seeing a drop in traffic.


It’s possible that your paid search team has recently increased their spending and this is eating into your SEO traffic. You should be able to check this very quickly by plotting your SEM vs. SEO traffic. If after doing this it’s not clear if this is a factor, it may be worth pausing your SEM campaigns for specific landing pages and seeing if SEO traffic rebounds for those pages.

To be clear, some degree of cross-breeding between SEM and SEO is inevitable, but it's still worth understanding how much of your traffic is going to waste and whether the increased clicks from your SEM campaigns outweigh the loss in SEO traffic (in my experience they usually outweigh the loss in SEO traffic, but still worth checking!).


If your SEM vs. SEO traffic graph looks similar to the one above (slightly extreme), SEM campaigns may be hurting your SEO traffic.