The ICP Drift Problem in SEO (event booking site’s case)

Analysis has shown that the majority of the traffic increase does not represent potential customers: peak traffic is event-day buzz, not buying intent. So, the search traffic charts was characterised by a series of smaller and larger spikes that correspond with important amateur sports event dates. 

To quantify the ICP mismatch problem I took only two events and employed a rule that clients normally book 4-5 months in advance over traffic spikes: it gave me an outcome that only around 10–15% of the reported growth may translate into any meaningful commercial outcome. The rest is vanity traffic — real visits, but from the wrong audience at the wrong time.

This traffic emerged as a result of addition of new events (that were not in place in 2025) and better indexation overall — so, the pages receiving traffic now simply were not existent / indexed previously.

The ICP drift concept

Effectively, the site was:

• ranked for event-day buzz,
• attracting spectators, 
• participant searches,
• daily schedules,
• general football interest.

But not:

• parents or coaches booking tournaments 5 months ahead.

How did it happen?

A short explanation is intentionally loosening the HTML title tag filter. For a while founders would apply general / loose titles to their event pages. As the website grew in number of URLs as well as authority — and without strong competition — these URLs would climb up SERP into Top-3 for broad queries associated with the name of events itself. It might be hard to believe but, essentially, the participation booking site was ranked in top results against the number of events attracting thousands on the event day. Needless to say, the audience was not happy with what they saw.

The picture was this:

• traffic grows,
• but from wrong users,
• producing poor engagement,
• which eventually degrades SEO quality signals.

This creates a feedback loop:

• more irrelevant traffic,
• lower engagement,
• weaker quality perception.  

SEO can optimize toward the wrong audience

SEO success created negative engagement signals. HTML titles as well as overall search queries targeting of event pages posed a structural problem. Pages are primarily optimised for the name of the event itself, sometimes combined with a city name or year, which makes a page competes for the entire universe of searches associated with that event name: programmes, photographs, results, participant lists, and so on. The site's actual value proposition — booking participation — was one small slice of that universe, and not necessarily the dominant intent behind those searches.

This laid a ground for three future scenarios that spring from one source — continuously reducing economic alignment between search traffic and organizations goals. 

Scenario 1 — As is (Do nothing). Despite a growing traffic, the proportion of non-ICP traffic will increasingly produce negative engagement signals — high bounce rates, low time-on-page, no conversions. Over time, Google will deprioritise the affected pages. Traffic rises until it stops, then deteriorates.

Scenario 2 — Add more event-adjacent content. The site strengthens / supplements event pages with schedules, programmes, etc to better serve the non-buying audience arriving around event dates. This potentially reduces the engagement signal problem and may strengthen brand recognition. However, this puts the site in direct competition with event organisers' own websites and dedicated sports media — a competition that is difficult to win sustainably. This approach mitigates the problem without solving it.

Scenario 3 — Realign content to buying intent. Event pages, category pages, and blog content are rewritten and restructured to reflect the actual search behaviour of the ICP: coaches and parents planning participation four to five months in advance. This means targeting keywords that reflect booking intent, planning intent, and tournament discovery — not event-day information queries. Combined with strengthened brand authority and a rebuilt content strategy, this is the only scenario that produces durable improvements in both traffic quality and conversion.

Why this happens increasingly often

A discussion with a client revealed an interesting point: they wanted to retain the broad appeal in order to safeguard from the competition. Literally, the founders said: if we go too specific and stick to the event booking positioning, the competitors would pick that traffic from us (and benefit from it).  

This idea deserves following through a connection between SEO and business model, namely, discussion of:

• content expansion,
• AI-assisted scaling,
• long-tail harvesting,
• topical breadth, and, finally,
• event/content arbitrage.

On one hand, an organization does arbitrage of event-related content (supplied by organizers) in exchange for traffic. In doing so, they use long-tail harvesting and AI-assisted scaling, etc. On the other hand, the model is not stable — data and content providers are potentially indiscriminative to booking platforms (will feed all), so these assets are hard to control strategically. Also, there’s a big time gap between booking events and the follow-up traffic feeding off the content updates: organizers are likely to ignore their content sharing pledge in 3-4 months as the hot season approaches.    

In any case, all these increase:

• discoverability,
• but not necessarily, commercial alignment.

The deeper implication

SEO systems optimize toward discoverability by default, while optimize toward economic intent. These are not automatically the same thing. Yet, when it comes to windfall traffic — like in this case — founders acknowledge that it’s non-ICP but often can’t resist increasing discoverability. 

Acknowledging they attract the wrong audience, founders also evidence the ICP drift, but view it as only partly intentional (their responsibility), partly — it’s still the “bug” of Google algorithm that works in their favour. And having it, organizations can’t simply go back — this time it is viewed as intentionally giving up to the rising competition that will inevitably use their “ICP puritanism” to weaken them.

When presented with 3 scenarios that are likely to happen to the search traffic, founders tend to add more event-adjacent content, i.e. try to keep the windfall traffic and work on engagement. As a reason, they evoked “brand”: