Organic traffic still down 9 months after redesign

[csmithal]

The Good: We redesigned our nature travel website (www.ietravel.com) in Drupal. Overall, it's a great improvement in look and usability. Also, we are ranking for more relevant search terms (the SEO was managed by an agency before, and there were a lot of junk terms in their campaigns that weren't converting).

The Bad: Organic search referrals have consistently been down 10-20% year-over-year each and every month.

The Ugly: I am trying to dig in and figure out why this is happening, and I'm at a loss. We are aggressively publishing to our blog 5 days a week, and I've built many keyword-focused landing pages.

Here's what I do know in terms of things that could be problems which I've seen in Webmaster Tools and SEOmoz tools.

1. I have a lot of files restricted by robots.txt - 1,337 of them. Many have to be that way by design because they are nodes generated by web forms (w/ private user data). The rest are "Dates & Rates" pages - I restricted them because for each destination they are very similar in content. Wondering now if that was a mistake. For example, http://www.ietravel.com/central-south-america/galapagos-islands/dates-rates

2. We have duplicate title tags on 462 pages. The Lightbox Module that was installed for our photo galleries was a disaster. I am researching a more SEO-friendly solution, but that solution is a month or more away.

3. We have 31 duplicate meta descriptions.

My question is, could these errors be THAT significantly impacting our rankings?

I should note that according to Google Analytics, Referral traffic & Direct traffic is also year-over-year every month since the redesign. I don't understand the Referral part especially, since we took great pains to put in many 301 redirects. There are no 404s or non-indexable pages showing up in Webmaster Tools either.

If anyone has any suggestions for problem areas or red flags I should investigate, please let me know. Really, any thoughts are appreciated.

Best,

Carlton

[RyanKent]

My company site is built in Joomla. It is undergoing a few changes including updating to HTML 5 / CSS 3 and a complete redesign. When it is 100% complete and ready to launch, I will put the site forth for discussion on this very topic. I have always worked to ensure we use valid code and so forth, but I have not used Microsoft's IIS tool to check for violations. At Alan's suggestion, I will do so for this site. I contend a professionally developed Jooma / WordPress / Drupal / etc site can perform as well as a hand-coded site BUT 95%+ of CMS sites are not professionally developed in my experience.

Just because a site owner hired a web developer to create the site does not mean it was professionally developed any more than hiring an SEO for consulting means you will receive professional results. This is my take on the topic. I am sure there are countering views.

[texmeix]

This is perfect Ryan, just the type of response I was hoping to find. My website is a database driven website and my opinion has been that the platform does not have nearly as much influence (if any) on organic rankings as the SEO working on the site.

In most every case where I've found an SEO related issue in a open source cms someone else has experienced it too and has already built a solution...and if it's new technology, like you said, an extension is usually soon to follow. The main concern I had and criticism I am trying to refute is that "because my site is built in drupal, it cannot/will not ever perform as well as a static HTML non-dynamic site"

I think your response helped answer this question, but I'd always be interested in additional feedback and other SEOMoz opinions on this matter. I was going to start my own post on this topic, but it seemed to fit so well with this ongoing discussion.

Thanks

[RyanKent]

**On a purely apples to apples comparison of sites from Static HTML vs CMS does HTML still have an advantage? **

Yes and No. It depends on what kind of advantages you refer to. Do you mean cleaner code? Faster updates? Costs to manage? Time? Ranking?

A CMS outputs HTML code. Whether you use Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, .NET or one of the dozens of other CMS, HTML code is being output. The code that is output will always be conformed to specific standards based on the CMS.

The good - the code can always be adjusted.

The bad - you may have to alter core files which would need to be reviewed after every CMS update.

An example: when Google introduces a new feature (authorship, canonical urls, etc) if you have a static html site you simply add the new code and you are done. With a CMS the changes are more complex. With that said, you can usually wait a short bit and someone will create an extension, or update an existing extension, which will offer that functionality.

If we move from theoretical to practical, most CMS-based websites are not professionally developed or maintained. Accordingly, there are tons of coding issues which cause a variety of problems.

Are you asking about a dynamic (i.e. database driven) site vs a static site? If so, a database driven site would have advantages of being able to offer a local search widget whereas a static site would not be able to offer that feature. That is just one example.

[texmeix]

This is great feedback. I too have my site on Drupal and have had multiple SEOs tell me that a CMS-driven site will not rank as well as a static HTML site. My question is this, if you had the exact same site on Drupal or any other CMS vs the same content on a traditional static HTML site, is there anything inherently inferior to the CMS site as it relates to SEO? I realize back before CMS had the ability to serve search engine friendly URLS and before canonical link tag was introduced the CMS could be considered sloppy and full of duplicate content, but that argument doesn't seem to hold as much merit anymore. On a purely apples to apples comparison of sites from Static HTML vs CMS does HTML still have an advantage?

Thank you

michael

[AlanMosley]

I cant really add to what Egal and Ryan has said. but i sent you a detailed report of some technical issues via your email from your website as my bit to help. Since you are using a cms yo will proably never get rid of them all, but there are some easy ones to fix, broken hyperlinks and generic non relevant link text. Never waste link text.

[AlanMosley]

My sort of Music

[ShaMenz]

yep...what he said

The most obvious reason for using noodp and noydir is to stop the search engine from using information from those directory listings (which may be out of date), but Google is choosing to return what it thinks" most accurately represent the content on the page these days. Sometimes that might be what you provide in your Titles and tags, sometimes not.

Sha

[EGOL]

Yep...  Just saying what I use... other people will probably want to find their own solution.

I was lucky to get the ClickTracks log file analysis program a long time ago... It was really expensive but has served me well for years.

You can get a wimpy log file analysis program at weblogexpert.com ... I use it for simple reports.

[RyanKent]

I like the idea of ClickTrack but unfortunately the product is no longer offered in a standalone form. It has been integrated into a platform designed to assist with e-mail marketing. The packaging solution is expensive (4 figures) and requires a annual contract.

[RyanKent]

If I can jump in, I would say no damage at all.

noodp and noydir merely tell Google not to use your site's information for title and meta descriptions rather then your DMOZ or Yahoo directory information. This option has less importance nowadays since Google is more aggressively changing those tags on their own.

[EGOL]

That is a source of the information that I was thinking about.

I use ClickTracks and get a similar report (with a full list of keywords).

[csmithal]

EGOL,

Would you be referring to Traffic Sources > Keywords report?
For example,

September 2011:
Search sent 6,200 total visits via 2,427 keywords
Non-paid keywords: 1,147
Paid: 137
Non-branded, Non-paid keywords: 2,168
*The above is an advanced segment I use.

September 2010:
Search sent 7,804 visits via 1,279 keywords.
Non-paid: 1,186
Paid: 3,954
Non-branded, Non-paid keywords: 2,020

This seems to reveal that things may not be as dire as I thought.
I did have less PPC spend July-Sept year-over-year.

[csmithal]

Sha,

Thank you for the Screaming Frog tool. It showed that several pages - including the HOMEPAGE - were noodp & noydir - I have no idea how this happened. Nevertheless, they have been resurrected.

How much damage do you think my homepage being set as noodp, noydir has done to my rankings?

[EGOL]

To assess longtail traffic gain or loss, I simply look at the number of keywords that deliver traffic during Month A and compare that to the number of keywords delivering traffic during Month B.

[FrontlineMobility]

Flawless roundhouse kick good sir.

[ShaMenz]

Wow! I'll take that as a compliment

Just don't tell Dr Pete!

Always easier to switch on to something when you see it produce a real result. Glad I could help.

Have a great night,

Sha

[RyanKent]

Thanks for the tip! You convinced me.

I had read Pete's article on the topic but it wasn't enough to motivate me to go and download it. Thanks for sharing.

[ShaMenz]

Hey Ryan,

Just using Screaming Frog SEO Spider. It has proven very reliable and quickly identifies errors, server status for every page and much more.

The caveat is that I always check any Status code errors in the browser as there are quite often situations like this where the server is returning a Status error when the page renders fine in the browser.

You just have to be careful to ensure that if you want to scan the root domain you use the non-www URL as usual.

Hope it's useful,

Sha

[RyanKent]

Sha? Do you have a tool which scans all pages on a website looking for redirects? Or are you using a crawler?

[ShaMenz]

Hi Carlton,

Awesome answers from everyone here!

I just wanted to add that it appears there is only the one 302 redirect that has been incorrectly placed, but of course it is an important one as 302 redirects do not pass link value, so any external site that happens to have linked to your non-www domain will not be adding value to your link profile.

Also, this page http://www.ietravel.com/central-south-america, although appearing to be fine when viewed in the browser, is returning a 500 Error for crawlers (Internal Server Error). You will need to get your tech people to sort this out for you.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[RyanKent]

how do you so quickly identify the 302 redirect?

There are many tools which can perform this function. Since you are here at SEOmoz it is likely you have the MOZbar installed. Navigate to http://ietravel.com then click the Analyze Page button and select Page Attributes then scroll to the bottom. You will see the 302 header code.

I did not look any further but whomever fixes this issue should not simply resolve this one redirect. They should examine all the redirects to ensure no other 302s are in use.

Do you think I would be better off just deleting these nodes that Drupal generates from the forms?

I would not suggest deleting anything which offered a value to you or your site's visitors. If you know the issue will be resolved in the future, my suggestion would be to leave things as-is and focus your efforts on other areas.

any tips on pulling specific reports/tools to identify where a drop in long-tail has occurred?

I am still searching through SEO tools trying to find the best ones for various tasks. I don't have any suggestions here but hopefully others may share their experiences.

[csmithal]

Magento,

Thanks for your input. Linkbuilding is one piece of the puzzle I've not had the budget for....Any recommendations for services? You are welcome to PM me offline.

Cheers

[csmithal]

Hello Ryan. Thanks for participating in helping me figure this out. You are correct - competition in our space has really ramped up in the last year as we fight for the last bit of consumers' disposable income. Also, there has been a steady decline year-over-year in travel-related search terms, according to Google Insights.

RE: the robots.txt. On the form pages - we actually do NOT have a customer log-in area (planned for an upcoming improvement), so that's why I had them blocked by robots - as a safeguard. Do you think I would be better off just deleting these nodes that Drupal generates from the forms? I had been leaving them there because I wanted to have the historic data on hand, but it seems to be doing more harm than good.

Also, how do you so quickly identify the 302 redirect? Our DNS controls are administered by parent company's support, so I'll need some "proof" to get this error corrected.

Finally, any tips on pulling specific reports/tools to identify where a drop in long-tail has occurred?

Thanks again for your insight.

[csmithal]

Wonderful reply, EGOL. I am very inspired - I hear 'getting stronger' in the background.

Correct you are about the competitiveness of this space - and we have actually recently had a huge competitor enter the space for our Amazon River cruises.) We are challenged with a lean budget, and I am a one-man e-commerce show.

I think you are right - it's time to go back to basics w/ the term-targeting grader. Solid suggestions on the UI as well.

Question: To your analytics point, what is the best way to determine if the long-tail search volume has dropped? I'm trying to think of the best way to pull this in Google Analytics.

Thanks again for your inspirational post and insight.

[Francisco_Meza]

csmith, you just got a great site review and FREE. Egol is right, you are competing with the savages. That's like trying to compete for the word "car insurance" or "real estate". I have a small site which ships cars overseas and I am launching a new campaign to compete in "container shipping". I am in the process of hiring our a couple link builders because I know that's a very competitive field, but not as competitive as yours.

EGOL, I'm going to watch that movie now. I can see the similarity of cannibals. Call it cut throat marketing!

[RyanKent]

lol! I was expecting maybe Survivor - Eye of the Tiger.

[EGOL]

Listenin' to this right now...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWvOY3NdWvk

[RyanKent]

What an awesome reply. Mine was rather boring in comparison. I can feel the energy from your reply. It's as if a fast-paced, upbeat song is playing in the background which causes your blood to race.

[EGOL]

You compete in a very aggressive space with lots of professional muscle.  The SEOs in this space are experienced, hungry, savvy and sometimes tricky.  The sites that you compete against have enormous development budgets and can toss teams of people into a project.  Their authors produce best-on-the-web content with first class authorship, fantastic maps, great photos and more.   I could go on and on.

You don't reveal this in your post but my question is.....

What are you doing that will put you on a footing to compete with these cannibals - even in small niches?

SEO in the travel area is a "Battle of Resources".

======================

Some suggestions after a quick look at your site...

-- I think that your on-page optimization needs kicked up a notch.  I would read the SEOmoz guide.  Run the optimization tool in the rankings checker.  The terms that you are gunning for based upon title tags are not even present on some of the pages that I visited.  You are competing against the cannibals. Sharpen your knife!

-- What are you putting on this site that will stand apart in your niche and attract links?  I see lots of short content with chest thumping.  How about some real meat about your destinations?  For example, you offer a Galapagos tour but I can't find much about why people would want to visit that destination...  What are they going to see... what important things happened there.. why are these islands some of the most unique rocks on this planet..  Walk in the steps of Darwin and share some of his observations... the history of the place, conservation, iguanas, boobies, tortoise, flightless cormorants, tropical penguins., the unique environment... people are fascinated with volcanoes!    I hope that your tour guides know about all of this stuff and are ready to sing about it.    Convince me that you are the tour company that should take me.  I am not convinced that you know what is there.  I wanna be sure that I get my money's worth and make good use of my time.  I am not convinced that you know enough about this destination to teach me anything.  Tell me the story that will get my blood pumping to visit and ready to reach for my wallet!

-- Give people pages that they can link to from their FB wall and say... I AM GOING HERE!  WOW!  Eat your heart out!

-- What are you doing to make this site exceptionally easy to share via social media?  I can't find the buttons... oh...  there are a couple darked out ones waaaay down in the bottom of the footer.  Nobody is looking down there... put them up high were everyone will see them and get their mouse on them quickly.

-- Don't advertise an empty forum at the top of your site.  Get some action in there.  Have your guides post some conversation starters.  Have them invite questions.  Ask a few satisfied travellers to share their experience. Visitors are going to leave if they look in there now.

-- On your chat page get CENTRAL TIME right up there with the times of operation.  People don't know if your chat team is in London, Tokyo or Peoria.

-- You say that your traffic is down year-over-year.  Have you looked into analytics to see if your rankings have dropped, if your long tail has fallen, where was that lost traffic coming from.   Just guessing, I think that you are losing it to competitors in your niche who are aggressively building best-on-the-web content that attracts lots of heavy links and scoops long tail traffic away from other websites.  Also, even small websites in your niche are building pages with substantive content that are optimized for specific keywords like finely crafted arrows.

-- Finally, your destinations each had several pages of information and when I clicked from one to another they were slow to load and did not have a consistent look and feel.  I recommend a seamless format and am wondering if the big juicy photo at the top is the way to go.  They are great photos but they are pushing your content way down and are not consistent from page to page.... I wondered if I was still on the right part of the site.

========================

I know that I poked really hard at you in my reply.  But in this niche you got to go for their throats because they are already reaching for yours.

Good luck.

[RyanKent]

Hi Carlton.

Congratulations on the new website. Drupal seems like a solid CMS choice.

My first suggestion is to avoid the use of robots.txt as much as possible. When you installed Drupal there was probably a default robots.txt file as part of the installation. Do everything you can not to add additional entries to the file.

Your site has a specific amount of PR. When you block a page with robots.txt, all the PR on that page is wasted as the page cannot be read by crawlers. A much better option is to add the "noindex" tag to pages you wish to keep out of Google's index. This tag would apply to pages such as the dates-rates page. For the pages with user information, I presume the user had to log in to provide their private information? If so, Google will not crawl any pages behind a login. An exception would be if a URL was provided with the username and password included as parameters in the URL, but that method is very uncommon.

You do want to resolve your duplicate title tags and duplicate meta descriptions.

With respect to your 10-20% traffic drop year over year, there are many potential factors. The world economy is not all that great. Is the travel industry as a whole suffering a drop?

Some other possibilities would be any competitor(s) offering promotions or increasing their SEO efforts, tv ads, magazine ads or any other form of marketing. A new website or company could also be competing for your business.

My overall advise would be to continue to focus on building your website and it's SEO. If you really want to pursue the issue of last year's sales drop further, you would need to thoroughly analyze your Google Analytics data. Look at exactly which pages attracted traffic, from which sources, using which keywords, etc. Perform a similar analysis for this year. Determine exactly where you traffic dropped. You would need to determine if your rankings dropped, or perhaps the traffic on your keywords dropped, etc.

EDIT: I noticed when I tried to visit ietravel.com, the page was 302 directed to www.ietravel.com. I strongly recommend changing the redirect to a 301. 99%+ of the time, a 302 should never be used. Review your site to ensure there are no other 302s in place.

Some other suggestions:

• add trust symbols to your site. BBB, Verisign, TRUSTe and other symbols have been proven to increase trust and conversion rates.

• Move your social engagement symbols out of your footer and to a more visible location on your site.

• review each page of your site, especially the pages 1 click from your home page. I looked at your "about-ie" page and noticed you have an anchor text link "Award-Winning Nature Travel" which is a broken link.