Traffic dropping after blog was added...

[WhiteHat12]

We have a major client that gets over a thousand organic visits per day. They also self manage an adwords campaign that generates a few thousand clicks a day. Lat summer they got a new website with a blog. The blog has a couple of teaser paragraphs on the home page with the new blog posts, in addition to lots of static text about the items sold on the site. What has happened is, our organic traffic has changed form the main keywords of what the site sells, to things talked about in the blog. Traffic hasn’t dropped dramatically, but we have lost all our big keywords, for example, a keyword that was generating 40 organic clicks per day a year ago we receive no traffic for now, and much more obscure keyword combinations from the blog are being picked up. Is it the addition of the blog that is causing this problem, or the blog teasers that are on the home page of the site? We like the traffic from the blog terms, but we would like our former main keyword traffic back as well, how can we accomplish this, and what do you think has occurred here? Thanks for your help.

[WhiteHat12]

Thanks for your replies. I do not know what they were ranking for their main keywords a year ago because I wasnt working on the account back then and dont have any webposition reports from that time. I do have analytics for back then and can see they were getting like 40 click thrus a day for each exact keyword and now there are basically none for those keywords. Interestingly, according to webposition, they are on the second page of google now for these really huge high traffic keywords,  but the same keywords on webmasters tools show low impressions and a position of 380. The top keywords shown on webmasters tools are all much more obscure terms from the blog. Webmaster tools also shows 400 not founds and 70,000 pages restricted by robots text. I addressed these issues with our programmer in early January and he said the robots was as it should be and the not founds were taken care of but doesnt look like anythings changed. Basically the only keywords the site is getting click thrus thru search on are much more obscure things that are mentioned in different blog posts. For example, it would be like my site used to get traffic for "custom motorcycles" (just an example)but now if I have a blog post for brown leather motorcycle seat, we'll get a handful of click thrus for something like that but we have lost all the heavy hitting keywords.
No site map on WT but if you google site: it shows 32,000 pages. Thanks again.

[SlavaRybalka]

I vote up for keyword cannibalization. They should also check their Webmaster panel to see which pages get more link love than the others.

[JGar-28032]

It's a little tough without looking at all the details, but here are my thoughts/suggestions.

Missing Old Pages - This may be happening because of a new design/CMS. I see this a lot when clients go for a new, WordPress site. It's a great idea, but they neglect to implement 301 redirects for all those old pages that had rankings, etc.

Check your 404 errors/Google Webmaster Crawl errors. You might find a bunch of pages that are being linked to, were updated with a new URL structure and now result in an error. You might find that setting up the 301s does the trick (give it a couple weeks once you're done).

Check for keyword cannibalization - See if the keywords you were targeting on those "main" pages are also being targeted on those blog posts. Might need to clean that up a little; ensure that each page has unique info/focus/titles, etc.

It is possible that the links to those posts is spreading your link juice a little too thinly, but I wouldn't jump to that conclusion just yet. I only say it because a year is a long time, and you could have tons of posts that are drawing from that link juice.

[EGOL]

I can't tell you what is wrong.  But if you answer these questions you might figure it out.

we have lost all our big keywords, for example, a keyword that was generating 40 organic clicks per day a year ago we receive no traffic for now,

Did your rankings drop for these keywords?

Last summer they got a new website with a blog.

Did they change the page URLS of mess up the page optimization?