Why are we not seeing similar traffic patterns in a new market?
-
Good afternoon!
We have a large real estate site with over 400,000 urls. We do pretty well with long-tailed search terms (like addresses--- 123 Main Street, Atlanta GA) so we get a decent amount of traffic (3,500-4,000 uniques a day). 2 months ago we opened up in a new market (Nashville) and hoped to see similar traffic for that market after a few of months, but so far we haven't. In fact, we only get about 200 visits a day. I can't seem to figure out why it's taking so long for us to generate similar traffic in Nashville that we see in Atlanta. All of the Nashville properties are in our sitemap and are being indexed by Google. Any ideas why we aren't seeing similar effects?Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!
David
-
400,000 isn't an unreasonable number of pages on a real estate site if they have reasonable amounts of unique content and the pages are implemented well within the site.
That said, it's much more difficult to pull off with a site that has lower DA & PA and few links.
-
True, I don't think site size will by itself hurt you, but I do think there is something to building your site up over time.
I think having a great first impression goes a long way. If google finds the bathroom stall before it sees the grand lobby then google my just quite at " this is a crap website."
... granted, I've never built a website with 400,000 pages... I mean there are a lot of bugs in the world, but would you read 400,000 pages about pest control?
-
Here are a few of the questions I would start with from what you have asked:
- How much of each site's traffic is coming from Google?
- How many inbound links does the original site have?
- How thin is the content of the new site?
- How quickly were the 400,000 pages added to the new site?
- How many of those pages are indexed by google right now?
- How original is the content?
While domain age in of itself isn't always a factor, a site's history in the search engine is. I am going to assume that your new site is created dynamically. If you simply plop down 400,000 pages then it's going to take some time for google index and evaluate all of those pages. Whereas your older site may have started with more history. It may have begun with a few less pages and gradually built up.
From my own personal experience, I have used the same format on several different websites and while it would seem that since the formula is the same and the search engine is using the same set of rules, I still get varying results. The formula works most of the time so I just move on and let the sites simmer. If formula A never kicks in then I move to formula B.
You may want to try a different city to check your formula A and make sure that your first success wasn't just lucky.
-
Number of URLs alone independent of anything else shouldn't be a reason to randomly deindex a lot of your site to an arbitrary number. Can you offer any more background on your suggestion?
-
You say that you have "400,000 urls" and you do not seem to realize that THIS is the problem!
You need to de-index a lof your site to gain the trust back from Google.
Trust does not come from having 400.000 urls - it comes by having 200 + good pages with original content per location.
-
Hi David,
I'm following up on older questions that are still marked unanswered. Are you still seeing this discrepancy, or has it sorted itself out now that you've had the site up longer? Are you still looking for advice about this issue?
-
It looks like the disparity of traffic is largely due to your recent entry into the market, the primary contributor to the SEO factors already mentioned. Many factors are at play, as usual, and here are some interesting sidenotes:
(According to Wikipedia)
The Atlanta metropolitan area, with 5,268,860 people,<sup id="cite_ref-3" class="reference">[4]</sup> is the third largest in the Southern United States and ranks fourth in the number of Fortune 500 companies headquartered within city boundaries, behind New York City, Houston, and Dallas. Atlanta Metropolitan Area ranks as the 10th largest cybercity (high-tech center) in the US, with 126,700 high-tech jobs (tech jobs=high turnover=more home sales=internet savvy population).
Atlanta is far more dynamic in the real-estate market than Nashville
The Nashville metropolitan area = 1,600,358
Music industry professionals don't tend to move around much, especially country music industry professionals.
My opinion: with time and some SEO effort, you can reduce the traffic gap, but not close it.
-
In order to rank for specific terms you must have relevant links with the right anchor text to those pages. If you have just made more pages and are only linking to yourself then you are effectively trying to just tell everyone that you are an authority without anyone else's opinion. So if you aren't being voted for (ie linked to) by other pages to say that your Nashville pages are what they are then you may just have a whole lot of low authority pages and need to build up more value.
Taking a look at your site you only have a little over 1000 links to your site with most of them going to the domain. deep linking is going to be key to your success or else you are trying to determine your own relevance.
hope this helps
-
This is a side note to the previous comments. You can try to boost your rankings quickly (quick is relative) with social media metrics. This is a real-estate agent in my city, http://hometourgoodness.com/ he gets a lot of interaction on Facebook and Twitter. If you are able to engage in social media you will boost your in-bound traffic, and help serps.
-
For me this is guess work as I don't know the URLs, but is it possible that people in Nashvile use other search terms than you are ranking for or have other ways to search for property? ans do you use those search terms as well? I've seen somthing simular within Germany where it turned out people were using a slightly different version of the keywords.
Are all pages in the Nashville section being measured properly? Is the GA code implemented on all the pages? As you mention that you have only 70% of traffic compared to that of Atlanta.
And I think it could also be a matter of trust. is your brand new in the Nashville area? Than people might be more responsive towards your competitors.
Geddy
-
Hi Barry-
We are not ranking as well for Nashville, but we follow the same formula for links/layout in both markets. We don't have any inbound links to property pages (example: http://clickscape.com/9753-Palmeston-Place-0-Johns-Creek-GA), but we rank on the first page of SERPs in Atlanta for these similar long-tailed terms due to site architecture/navigation. The formula is not working in Nashville and I was just curious if there was a reason why that might be.
Also, you are correct. The search volume in Nashville is about 70% of the volume in Atlanta so that definitely plays a role.
-
Are you ranking as well for terms in Nashville the same as Atlanta?
I would imagine other sites are outranking you and you need to build 'Nashville' specific links into some of your pages to start showing up.
Also are the search volumes for real estate terms as large in Nashville as Atlanta?
A combination of all of these could be the cause of the lower search volumes.
-
All thing being equal, the age of a domain accounts for a very tiny amount of ranking weight, if any at all. It's not really ever a reason I would give for why a website is or is not ranking for any given set of terms.
-
First, are you being outranked by competitors? Try doing some long tail searches similiar to what you get for areas like Atlanta.
If you seem to be ranking for those searches just as well as you normally would, it could be that areas like Nashville have less heavy internet users. Keep in mind that you're likely to have more results for a good ranking result based in NYC compared to the boondocks of Oregon... simply because of the number of people in the area searching for the item in quesiton.
-
Some of the following will be guesswork since you didn't provide any URLs, but I'll try my best. This old (Atlanta targeted) website, has it been around for a (quite) longer time than the newer (Nashville) domain? Besides the amount of links the older domain has most likely collected, domain age appears to influence ranking on its own (even though only slightly, #10 in the ranking factors http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors). Does the Nashville targeted website have the same amount of local (and related) backlinks as the Atlanta targeted website? You've mentioned that the Nashville website is only live for about 2 months, which I'd consider a really short time to draw any real conclusions to be honest.
With some more time and the same effort as you've put into the Atlanta targeted website, I'm sure the new one will perform in a similar fasion!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Moving our Google Analytics Account to a New Account
My company is building a new website with a new web development company. Our old website development company hosted our Google Analytics account on their account (this was done 13+ years ago, probably a good idea then, but we definitely would've done it differently knowing what we know now). I've been researching how we could move our GA property to a new account owned by us, but according to this article: "There are some circumstances in which you cannot move a property:
Reporting & Analytics | | GreatLegalMarketing
-> The source account and the destination account are not in the same Google Marketing Platform organization. Contact an organization admin to make sure both accounts belong to the same organization." In our case, the source account and the destination account do not belong to the same organization. I may just have to accept that we are losing 13+ years of historical data about our website, and if that's the case, oh well. But, if anyone has an idea how we can export/import our GA data to our new analytics account, I would greatly appreciate it.0 -
Google's Not Provided - What can I see and what can't I?
Hi Guys, I've been looking into my company's analytics's data recently to establish where most of our traffic is coming from. More so, I want to get an indication of the percentage of organic traffic that is coming from branded and none branded terms. Not provided takes up 80% of my organic traffic and the vast majority of keywords that are provided all mention the brand name. Does analytics's provide you with all of your branded traffic but just block others that it doesn't want you to see? Or is it just coincidence that the majority of the terms I can see are all branded? I am just trying to establish how strong our brand is and how much traffic the brand name brings against none brand terms. All help is appreciated! Thank you!
Reporting & Analytics | | Sandicliffe1 -
Finding an Explanation for a Massive Spike in Organic Search Traffic
Hi, I watch analytics on a website (for a friend's business) that is reasonably stagnant, which just experienced a massive spike in search traffic for no explainable reason. The organic search engine traffic had always been steady, but about two months ago, organic search traffic started rising slowly. I checked OSE & a few other tools, but couldn't find any massive source of gained links or other explanations - just the usual occasional blog post about the company. I got in touch with my friend to see if maybe they'd gone with a competitor or something else, but he also had no idea (and even if he wasn't being honest with me, we still should've been able to spot links or social metrics or something!) Then, yesterday, their organic search traffic just tripled. The crazy thing is, it's not from one keyword: Every search term, and (not provided) essentially went up 200-400%. And I have no freaking idea why. No large gain of links. No website editing. The only possible explanation I thought up is maybe one of their competitors got knocked out, but I doubt that would cause such a stratospheric rise. So figured I'd turn to y'all. Any ideas on what might be causing such wonderful results? Anyone have any good tips on figuring out why a website could all of a sudden be doing incredibly? Analytics chart is below for the curious, and thanks in advance for any ideas / tips! nQHrscw.png
Reporting & Analytics | | FlynnZaiger0 -
Senuke and traffic generator program is a good idea?? I think i got some problems now.
First of all thanks for reading, especially if you are the one whose bright ideas will help me out:) I started using senuke xcr about 3 months ago, obviously at the beginning i didnt make much success(not like I do now). Later i bought that inferno thingy and it actually works. First 2 weeks didnt make much difference(although i could see some little but stable uprising) but after 4th week ended, the average impression and queries doubled up, 6th went up again, its like every week or two it jumps up and keeps it there. Also the actual traffic from keywords went up! When about the second week finished, i started using a traffic generator program, first it leveled out the impressions and seemed to help a bit. Lately i think it messed it all up, plus about 2 weeks ago there was 2-3 dayswhen i sent a bit more traffic than usual and around that time the average rising of impressions didnt happened, it might even went down. Now i stopped using traffic g. and everything stayed the same no improvement!! Anyone could help me? I need to get it moving up again! Also im still nowhere near the top as the keywords are competitive well at least for me. What do i do wrong and what should i do? Also what about traffic generator? ps is it safe or/and or allowed to write that? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Sugafree0 -
Amazon.com inc.increase in direct traffic
Hi All, I have seen a increase of direct traffic from hostname amazon.com inc. This only happened on one day. Any ideas what/why it is? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Sayers0 -
Magic UVs - PPC landing pages delivering organic traffic by magic...
I have checked and double checked this. GA is showing over the last couple of weeks mysite.com/ppc/landingpage1 as a landing page for organic traffic, where it shouldn't. Main facts: The entire /ppc/ folder is blocked from the googlebot, and doesn't appear on any internal site maps. As far as I can tell, these pages have never been cached for the main index. I cannot recreate any of the organic searches myself (i.e. typing in keywords that triggered the traffic, even the almost unique long-tail ones). We just don't appear in the organic listings with these pages. The analytics and adwords accounts are linked. We are not paying for this mystery traffic through our PPC - these keywords are not appearing in our AdWords account (though other keywords / traffic are). The traffic is real - we have received phone calls from these pages, tracked to the visits recorded as organic These pages should only receive PPC traffic. They are receiving organic traffic also, but I can't recreate it. Can anyone suggest what's going on? I'm concerned about duplicate content issues and also skewing the analysis of the PPC campaign. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | RobPell0 -
Google's New Privacy Policy and Analytics
Does anybody know if Google's new privacy policy allows it to use data gathered by Analytics to be used as a ranking factor in the SERPs?
Reporting & Analytics | | Jolora0 -
Seeing / and no / in Google Analytics
When I look at my Google Analytics code, I see that the same content will show up twice, once with a / at the end of the URL, and once without. My site is at http://www.skypeenglishclasses.com. Does anyone know why this would happen? Is it duplicate content?
Reporting & Analytics | | Paulguy0