Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Category: Search Behavior

Learn more about search behavior and search trends.


  • I've recently upgraded to a WP site but i have a very high bounce rate.  It is typically 75-80% and recently I saw a 95% bounce rate.  I found part of the issue was I neglected to change the urls for my adwords acct but I did that weeks ago and its still very high.  Last week, for 1 day only i had 18% but it shot back up when I made some code changes that didn't pan out as expected. The site is an online store and is www.cheaptubes.com I really need to fix it. my business is severely hurting.  Any and all ideas are appreciated.

    | cheaptubes
    0

  • On December 30th, 2015 I decided to look at the Moz Community Rankings, I find it fun to do for time to time, and I always like to see how close I am to getting that special dinner with Rand I have heard so much about in the past. One thing I noticed right away is that Moz ranks members just on MozPoints, and not on other factors like, how helpful they tend to be. This means had I joined in a few years earlier, I could be at the top.. or could I be??? Again, it is just something I did for fun, but I decided to look at a few additional factors to get my True MozRank 🙂 By examining just the top 50 active members I added some additional ranking factors and aggregated them to find a true Rank. The ranking factors are.. Moz Points Per Month (Using the users points divided by months they have been a member) Thumbs Up percentage (Using the percentage of Thumbs Up they receive per point) Good Answer percentage (Using the percentage of Good Answers they receive per point) Endorsed Answer percentage (Using the percentage of Endorsed Answers they receive per point) After that I gave each of the top 50 a rank in each category based on their respective scores. I then totaled the ranks, and assigned a new final rank based on the lowest totals (which means they ranked the best).
    Edit (01/18/2016): With the help of Peter Nikolow I aggregated all active users as per this post.
    Link to all 4291 active users ranks
    For example EGOL category ranks: MozPoint Rank (1) Points Per Month Rank (2) Percent of Thumbs Up Rank (27) Percent of Good Answers Rank (29) Percent of Endorsed Answers Rank (23) Total = 82
    Final Rank = 5 His closest competitor RyanKent MozPoint Points rank 2 MozPoint Rank (2) Points Per Month Rank (3) Percent of Thumbs Up Rank (39) Percent of Good Answers Rank (9) Percent of Endorsed Answers Rank (20) Total = 73
    Final Rank = 2 Well it was a fun experiment for me, a couple people are out of place in the rankings based on other factors but for the most part MozPoints are pretty accurate. You can view the spread sheet on Google Docs and play around with the data as you wish. Don EDIT: After looking at the document again I noticed an error with rank assignments I have since fixed it. Edit (01/18/2016): With the help of Peter Nikolow I aggregated all active users as per this post. Link to all 4291 active users ranks

    | donford
    13

  • Hi there, Wondering if you can help please? I am needing to know bounce rates on a landing page and also wanting to know if they landed on that page and went from that page to another and another... how can i look at that on MOZ please? Thanks Cass

    | AITLtd
    0

  • I am working on some reporting to determine the percentages of my customers return and purchase again. I was going to use segments to break it out using ecommerce transactions in the conditions, 1 purchase, 2 purchases, etc. But my question is, after selecting a date range, would that only show those figures for that particular date? For example, if a person made a purchase in Oct, and another in Nov and another in Dec, which showing only December, would it show that individual as 1 purchase or 3? Whats the best way to segment that out? I want to basically see how our repeat business is doing compared to new customers during specific periods of time.

    | ShockoeCommerce
    0

  • Hi there! I've been checking rankings in UK and Ireland for the last months and I found something really interesting... "Belfast + keyword" - UK = 2º position / Ireland = 1º position "keyword + Belfast" - UK = 14º position / Ireland = 1º position *(same keyword) I don't understand how it is possible... Website is not geo-targeted so Google has no preference for any of these countries... Any ideas about why does it happen?

    | seosogood
    1

  • Hello everyone! I have 2 questions : 1. does anyone come across this behavior ? (image 1). In the last week Page crawled per day behavior was quite wild and it wasn't affect directly on Time spent downloading a page. 2. I'm getting site map warning for high response time (image 2) i have 29M pages so I aware that 4 warning for 4 pages is almost negligible but still ? Thanks to all helpers 8OkgXp7 q3txRAb q3txRAb

    | Roi_Bar
    1

  • I'm getting ready to take on a new client for SEO, but she is having a hard time understanding I'd like to rank her for "Her" and her new book, rather than keywords for her ambiguous keywords which show very little to no search volume from Keyword Planner data. Her website and domain name are only 4 months old Her book launches sometime in December (most likely January 2016) Her services (she's a consultant) provide little keyword volume She is persuaded she needs to rank for her service keywords I feel strongly we need to get her name, her method/approach and her book optimized She is seemingly difficult to work with, but once I build trust in SEO for her, so will be a great, long client Her consulting services are based on Change and Transition for wealthy individuals going through career change, divorce, pay increase, pay decrease, depression, children, etc... targeting Executives, C-Level Execs In this situation, what would you all do? How would this website or person even be optimized? Blog articles? Press releases? Guest blogging? Video blogs? Podcasts? It's a tricky one and hoping the Moz community can lend some ideas as this type of SEO would be new for me, yet I'm up for the challenge! Thank you in advance and look forward to your replies! - Patrick

    | WhiteboardCreations
    0

  • Hello, I see Buzzsumo being widely touted as a great way of seeing what other people are writing on a niche topic to give an indication of what is performing well according to the number of social media shares.  Is this a good metric considering that any proportion of the shares could be paid for or secondary to advertising?  I have looked at some of the sharers and often there is no data logged, or only a few listed.  I see that often the longer posts have more shares; if I had written a 7000 word post I would be more likely to push it harder on social media and spend more promoting it, I wonder if this is skewing the data also. Thanks for your opinions on this. Toby

    | T0BY
    0

  • Hi peeps, I am just interested in this from a usability POV and to see what you would prefer to see when you are met with a page that has multiple options. Lets say that the page looks like a list of services, each clearly marked out in its own segment, but there are 50-60 options that match your requirements. Do you like to keep scrolling, or would you prefer to take what is there and then move on if you feel you want to dig deeper? Would you like to see a long list, of have the options loaded in as you get to them? -Andy

    | Andy.Drinkwater
    2

  • Hello Moz Community, Starting August 12th, 2015, my overall website traffic bounce rate spiked literally over night and I am trying to figure out why? My traffic increase rate remained the same.
    My time on page actually nearly doubled.
    but my bounce rate shot up from 9% to 82%. This is the same issue for almost every page in my 500+ page website. My bounce rate in every page was always below 14%. And literally over night on August 12th, the bounce rate skyrocketed. Did something roll out around that time?
    Does anyone else have this same issue that would be kind enough to share some insight?

    | CamiloSC
    0

  • I need a tool that will run through a long list of URLs (from multiple domains), look for a specific string in the source code and then produce a CSV showing in which URLs the the string was found. This is for legitimate research, not for any nefarious purposes Any ideas of such a tool already exists?

    | richdan
    0

  • Search operator "site:" show incomplete information. When I search with just domain name it show only 3 link that got crawl in past week, this is the link https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=mLr3VfrhN4_BuATQuYugBg&gws_rd=cr&fg=1#q=site:sierralivingconcepts.com&safe=off&tbs=qdr: but when i look a specific link it show them in any time (search tools), https://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://www.sierralivingconcepts.com/p-6300-white-silver-regence-louis-xiv-mango-wood-ornate-hall-console-table.aspx&safe=off&biw=1600&bih=775&noj=1&tbas=0&source=lnt&sa=X&ved=0CBUQpwVqFQoTCJ-4iOLK-McCFQFwjgod43gI9A But when i look in cached page it says "appeared on 11 Sep 2015" I am total confused why google not showing all the new link that it crawl from my site.

    | Sierra-Living-Concepts
    0

  • Hi.  Just wondering what you all thought would be the best way to estimate a customer base for a certain niche? I'd be willing to pay for this service, if there are companies who do this sort of thing.  But I'm assuming I'll be able to do it for free... How much weight should I putting into facebook ad data? Any advice?

    | PedroAndJobu
    0

  • I just got up and see Search Analytic's being updated today totally. Their is no option to see old reports. As Search Analytics only share 999 keywords.
    Whats next now?
    How can a webmaster finds all search queries bringing traffic to his website?
    Any paid or free tool?
    Google Analytic's > Acquisition > Search engine optimization > search queries will this area helps? Whole question revolves around. Any good tool that will help you find all the queries bringing traffic to my website?

    | csfarnsworth
    0

  • Most of you guys probably already know - but Google Panda 4.2 has began. I would love to keep an open discussion regarding anyone who was affected by the last Panda update along with changes for the good/bad during this new roll out in addition to what vertical you are in. PANDA TIME! Your web therapist, Chenzo

    | Chenzo
    1

  • Hi All, One of our clients has asked why they are getting so much traffic from international countries when they solely operate in the UK. See attached image for % of customers who are visiting our site from different countries. Is this a normal ratio of traffic when we are only targeting UK customers? Thanks o6j2PEc

    | O2C
    0

  • Hi folks, My company has Google Analytics setup for all of our websites, but I am a bit stumped on something. Now, this may not be possible, but am I able to see what time of day visitors most frequently view my blog? I would like to optimize blog post publishing for when I know we have in influx of visitors, yet I cannot find this information on GA. Any input would be much appreciated. Regards,
    Meghan

    | Instabill
    0

  • Hi, We have two websites www.eurekasolutions.co.uk and www.eurekaaddons.co.uk - currently the eurekasolutions site has eureka addon products on it - we are thinking of re-directing these to www.eurekaaddons.co.uk instead (there are 100+ pages which are being ranked and picked up by google) Would it be foolish to re-direct these from eurekasolutions straight to eurekaaddons after them being on eurekasolutions for many many years? if so what is the best way to go about it and would this have a direct negative effect on our SEO? Both sites are serving for similar terms. Thanks,

    | EurekaSolutions
    0

  • Hi there, I am witnessing a giant spike in my Google Analytics data (website: www.exchangecapital.com ) and I am completely stumped. My website usually gains roughly 15-20 visitors a day at most--and as of 11:10 am today my sessions for the day are up to 150. The traffic spike started on Friday at 132 sessions, Saturday at 261, Sunday at 247, etc. It's common that our sessions don't even hit the double digits over the weekends, so you can imagine my confusion. After trying to pin down some irregularities in geography, browser, and behavior, I'm still at a loss. I'm seeing a big spike in organic traffic (all not provided), as well as direct page visits, and I'm gaining traffic from US, Brazil, United Kingdom, Mexico, Spain, Malaysia, etc. etc--so not just one specific area. Is anyone else witnessing this in their data? Does anyone have any insight or ideas as to how I can look further into this? I am at a loss and any information would be appreciated. Thanks in advance! Lauren McLaughlin

    | LMcLaughlin
    0

  • Im just curious.. Im sure a lot of you, like me, Google your own search terms on a fairly frequent basis. Does doing this skew the result you are actually seeing? As in, does Google tailor the results more to my liking, and therefore perhaps show my own site (which I would click through to often enough) higher on the page that it actually is? Sometimes I swear that happens. Steve.

    | blitzna10
    0

  • I basically changed the title and meta description of my homepage and when i search on google, it still shows old. Whats the issue?

    | prestigeluxuryrentals.com
    0

  • Hi guys, I'm looking for a predictive analytics software for better understanding our audience online. Has anyone heard of or used a software that takes the visitors currently coming to your site and uses that data to 'predict' more information about them? Such as age, location, purchasing power, etc? Please let me know if you have!
    Thanks,
    Sabilah

    | Raconteur
    0

  • Hi, We have a contact and a registration form on our website to capture leads/enquiries. However, I have come across many websites who give away many resources for free i.e. without asking for any user details. In this case, how do they track or capture the data of people coming to their website and interacting with the content? There are other methods we well like CTAs, pop-up on exit intent etc., but these are different to what I have asked above. Regards

    | IM_Learner
    0

  • Hi all, We receive a feed containing new products every morning, some products are removed and this obviously ends up in Webmaster as a 404. Is it fine to leave this as a 404 or would 301'ing the link be a better option? If we leave as a 404 we end up with thousands after a couple of month which scares me and makes finding actual 404s more difficult. Essentially, if lots of pages are being removed everyday, what's the best way of tackling these? Thanks!

    | HB17
    0

  • Do you know know if a tool exists that shows shared common interests? For example, people interested in Soccer are also interested in Cricket, beer and Scarlett Johansson. The data might could come from social media or search queries. Anyone seen a tool that does anything like this?

    | richdan
    1

  • Hello, I will try to explain what I want and I am not sure if that is possible. Firstly I want to set up my Google Analytics that I would know where people come from and how many of them click on Google Ads. For example:
    Facebook > 2% of them click on ads.
    Google > 3% of them click on ads.
    Direct > 6% of them click on ads.Or whatever the results are. Secondly I would like to take people coming from facebook and divide them into age groups. For example: 100 ad clicks from facebook.
    25-34: 9 clicks (9% of total facebook clicks, 2% of total ad clicks)
    18-24: 7 clicks (.....
    35-44: ... and so on Thirdly I would like to know which group use the adblocker the most.
    Any other stuff that would be interesting if working with adsense? I believe that this would help me working with my target audience the best on facebook. Should this be set as goals? Sorry I am not an expert of Google Analytics 🙂 Thanks for the help.

    | FCRMediaLietuva
    0

  • Hi I'm trying to get my head around google analytics as a first time user. Can any suggest the best place to start after I have taken a look through the whole thing, how do I go about managing and tracking performances on my website? eg: Registrations/sign ups, conversions all that sort of thing Some advice will be much appreciated Thanks

    | edward-may
    0

  • unfortunately its very bad for us . after panda update not affected any more but recent time . anybody can help us to fix the issue blog          http://gurujobalert.com/ please thanks in advance

    | jenindras1
    0

  • Hello everybody, With hummingbird update i think i understand that two pages like exclusive dating website chic dating services which could have been targeted on 2 different pages can now be targeted in a single one. 
    In the end google is asking "Well... isn't an "exclusive" dating website the.. same as a "chic" one ? isn't it the same visitor intent which is triggered ? ". I'm building a new keyword study for one of my websites and i'm trying to be more in the "intent" point of view than in the "keyword" one. I've added a new column to my study which includes transactional / navigational and informational dropdown. I think this information is great but i feel that something is missing... I wonder if we could include a column which describes the real visitor intent in the form of a "user story" 
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_story for example : As a visitor i want to land on a page that proves that the company is only working with "exclusive" people.
    -> We could optimise this page for all the "exclusive" "chic" "fancy" "elegant" "elite" keywords. Just a thought, i'd be really interested in knowing your point of view. Thanks a lot for your answers 🙂

    | Sindicic_Alexis
    0

  • Hey Mozers, I was brought on to the team to Optimize the old website to make it more SEO friendly and I was able to get some cool features up. What Analytic Key points should I keep track of? The website launches in 2 weeks and I think Now would be a great time to start gather data bout the old site.  I'd like to make sure I keep the website under a microscope to make sure there are as little errors as possible. What am I missing I already have: Page Authority Domain Authority Bounce Rate Time on page Visitors/Sessions Unique Visitors/Sessions

    | rpaiva
    0

  • Hello There, My question is the following: How come my rankings are much higher than when I started with the optimization process (1 year ago) but my organic traffic is lower compared to the previous year (it didn't increase at all)? NB  - I haven’t received any penalization and the keywords I am targeting are definitively searched and are the most important for my company. Thanks a lot 🙂

    | Midleton
    0

  • Are there any studies that show which is best?  If you find my page but not the specific thing you want on it, you may still find something of value.  But, if you don't you may associate my site with poor results, which can be worse than finding what you want at a competitor site.  IOW maybe it is best to have pages that ONLY and ALWAYS have the content desired. What do the studies suggest? I'm asking because I have content that maybe 1/3 of the time exists and 2/3 of the time doesn't...think 'out of stock' products.   So, I'm wondering if I should look into removing the page from being indexed during the 2/3 or should keep it.  If I remove it then my concern is whether I lose the history/age factor that I've read Google finds important for credibility.  Your thoughts?

    | friendoffood
    0

  • Does anyone know how to track keyword rankings locally? Like, if I want to track the ranking for "pizza" for people who search that in our local area? Thanks!

    | fiberglass
    0

  • How does/can Google read the plus and ampersand symbols? For instance if I optimise a webpage for 'black & white football' and another page for 'black + white football' would there be any difference in ranking position? Does Google take notice of such symbols or will it only pick up on the keywords 'black white football'?

    | Adam_SEO_Learning
    0

  • Hey Mozers, I currently run a catalog type website and there are no prices listed.  Would you happen to have an article of some sort that could back up why not listing prices is bad? I'm trying to express the importance of listing prices on the website. Can anyone help,  The more articles the better!

    | rpaiva
    0

  • Hi, I wondered if anyone has ever experienced anything like this before, one of our customers has a website JDB Events (http://www.jdb-events.com/). When he first came to us he was using Fast Hosts and he was experiencing down time pretty much every day in periods of up to an hour. The first step before carrying out any SEO was to place the website on our VPS so that the downtime issue was resolved. It did resolve the issue and the speed of the website was also increased. My next issue was to address the length of the Title on the home page because it was 157 characters, I usually keep these to 70 characters. This is the old Meta Title: JDB Events Limited - Event, Production & AV Hire Specialists | The West Midlands Dance Floor Hire, LED Furniture, DJ, Disco Hire & Event Services Specialists Here is the my new Meta Title: JDB Events | LED Furniture Hire for Parties and Corporate Events I have attached a screenshot of the drop that I have experienced, would anyone recommend that it's ok to keep the title longer so that I can cram more search terms into it, I use Woo Rank as a bench mark and this recommends shortening the title but I would be interested in hearing anyone's views. Other steps that I have taken: Shortened the home page description WWW Resolve Added Robots.txt Crawled all of the pages for 404 errors etc The next step I'm thinking of taking is replacing the amended meta title and description for the old one and monitoring that, other than that I can't see why I have taken such a hit. Thanks NewServerSpeedTest.png OldServerSpeedTest.png Rankings.png

    | chrissmithps
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, Would appreciate your input on a tool (free or paid) that provides accurate information on the volume of traffic (paid and organic) that a site is getting every month. It would be nice if the tool can also provide data on the pages with most traffic (and number) page wise for a website? Cheers, SEO5..

    | SEO5Team
    0

  • Hi. A client of mine offers multiple services and covers a region of the UK. They want to target each major town/city within this area. However, there are 20 cities and services offered range from 5-15 services. I am in the process of creating a location page for each city, so it can be optimised separately however I am not sure if there is a better way to do it? Or should I create a page for each city & service. So I for example I end up with 10 London pages with each one offering a different service? These can all be optimised for different services within London then? Any suggestions? Thanks

    | YNWA
    0

  • I have checked out everything, I mean everything. We have no dupe content, our content is a little thin, but it is ours and accurate enough to help our customers.We follow all SEO guidelines and make sure we de-index any pages with no / little content (like privacy, or faq) All in all, we haven't done any major updates to the sites, and everything was great (page one on almost all kw) but beginning of the month, all kw wiped to the second page, than third, than back to one and now pretty much gone (rank 100-200) I really don't know what to do. We didn't receive a manual action, and the last algo update was nothing big to cause such a drastic change. Meanwhile our competition (multiple sites) are gaining in ranks and nothing happened to them (most of them have even less content and not even SSL) Negative SEO is out of question, I check all links via ahrefs every other day. Any help is appreciated Thanks

    | s-s
    0

  • Hey Mozites! I was wondering if anyone has come across any good resources for industry benchmarks relating to google analytics? (Social stats would be great as well, but Google Analytics is my main concern) Specifically, I have a client that is a bank and I would love to be able to compare their stats (traffic, unique visitors, bounce rate, time on site, conversion rates...) to other regional banks. Any ideas? Thanks for reading and for your help!

    | iBecC
    0

  • Hello Mozzzzzzzzz fans ! One tiny, cute question. Has anyone ever faced the following situation: I'm working on trends projects but I'm struggling to access the information; Let say that we're trying to provide insight around the youth French people. What tool would you recommend to find the most accurate trends ? I've looked around: Google trends, Google Adwords Planning, Reddit, Quora .. Any other tools in mind maybe ?

    | JoomGeek
    0

  • Hello, I have one image from my blog post which is ranking well (ranking in first page for all related keywords) in Google web search as well as image search. Getting pretty good visits from the image result itself for past few days. But this image doesn't appear/rank anywhere in Bing and Yahoo search results. Can anyone tell any specific reason for the same? Any methods to follow? Any solution? Please guide me.

    | zco_seo
    0

  • I'm banging my head on this one.  In the past I was able to use Compete.com, Quancast, Google Trends, and Alexa, but now all these sites either required you to have Pro membership (pay) or they discontinue it like Google Trends for website. I need to do this comparison for one of my client... their traffic versus 4 of their competitors. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Have a blessed Day, Benny

    | ACann
    1

  • For some reason all pages on our site seem to be taking ages to load as they seem to be getting stuck at the "waiting for google-analytics.com"! Anyone else facing similar issues today?

    | prsntsnh
    0

  • Hi, I have a brochure style website mycompanyname.com that gives lots of detail about my company and what services we offer etc. I am soon going to be adding an commerce solution (haven't decided on opencart or paid such as shopify yet). I was wondering... is the best way to have a shop to have it on a completely separate domain like mycompanynameonlinestore.com or simply add it to a sub folder on my main brochure style website like mycompanyname.com/onlinestore Many thanks to anyone who takes the time to help me make up my mind!!!

    | SeoSheikh
    0

  • Hello all! I get these awesome emails from google about a specific site. But I am not sure how, and why. But I like the data it generates. I am uploading a screen shot. They are called Analytics' Snapshot. My question is basically: How to setup google analytics snapshot to report on a specific website in my account? Because I have several I track - Over 40 domains, but I am mostly concered with like 4 -5 of them, I would like to report on. Thanks Mozers!! GJF3iQX

    | smstv
    0

  • Hi All, I've been doing quite a bit of browsing around the topic of utilising https vs http when constructing urls and I wanted to know if anybody has research on the customer perception of a site where all urls are https. We originally used rel canonical tags to inform the browsers that the http and https were the same but we are considering stepping this up to having the http pages redirect to the https and I'm wondering how customers may react if they know that all pages are https. Anybody have insights on possible outcomes? Thanks, Tom

    | Tmon
    0

  • Hey i was wondering if anyone is aware of any tools at identifying demographic data for keyword terms. Like age, gender, etc? Cheers, AZ

    | MBASydney
    0

  • Hi All, What is the accepted % for visitors that conduct a store locator search online actually visiting that particular store for the nutrition industry? (For example if 50 people used the store locator search on the website , we can confidently say that 25 of them actually went to that store) Any input or reference to studies/white papers on this topic would be appreciated. Cheers, SEO5..

    | SEO5Team
    0

  • This question spawns from a comment I read in another post, but has anyone seen success switching from a hosting provider like bluehost, hostgator, etc to a local one in their area? Right now, we use Bluehost, but if there is a benefit to using one in Tampa, I'm all for it....before I do, I just want to see what the consensus is. Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.