"A client called me, concerned because their analytics data showed a drop in pageviews," writes Ian Lurie at Conversation Marketing. "[They] were dropping steeply, even as their rankings and traffic from organic search were going up."

The client, who had just re-launched her site, believed negative visitor reaction to the new design might explain the precipitous drop. After investigation, however, Lurie found data that seemed to invalidate that assumption: Time-at-site and bounce rate had remained stable, and overall site traffic had grown.

So what explained the troubling numbers? Lurie placed the blame on SEO—with the ironic explanation that her drop in pageviews was actually quite a good thing!

"A year ago," he explains, "Google could barely get past page 1 of my client's site. So everyone clicked in from the home page. That added 2-3 pageviews to every visit. Now, Google can find its way deeper into the site." And that means visitors can go directly to the information they most want to see.

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