Ranking well for main key terms but site traffic has dropped sharply?
-
Hello All,
Just a quick question.
Since the penguin update our site www.caravanguard.co.uk has seen some pretty fluctuating movement in Google, many of our key terms dropped over night, but over the last few weeks they have slowly started to move back up the rankings.
The bizarre thing is despite the recover in rankings our unique traffic has taken a fairly large whack in numbers. Seasonality? Weather? ( it's been nice in the UK for a change)
I can only assume the longer tail terms are taking more time to recover. I have tried to look into our back link profile and have noticed a little too much in terms concise keyword targeting, How do you go about changing these terms and removing the really bad links (struggling to identify the worst cases) on totally irrelevant sites or poor directories.
Put in place before I started here
Any help truly appreciated.
Regards
Tim
-
I have been looking at the organic keyword search position rankings on Google. I think
-
The bizarre thing is despite the recover in rankings our unique traffic has taken a fairly large whack in numbers. Seasonality? Weather? ( it's been nice in the UK for a change)
What rankings are you looking at? There are image rankings, blog rankings, news rankings. I'd bet on images.
-
Thanks for the insight Sven,
I have a had a look over the stats for the main keywords in our analytics and there is certainly a downward trend for our main keywords. I have been keeping track of the Ranking for our main terms via the rankings tool on SEO moz - we dropped as low as 10 from around position 5 since the Penguin update. In the last ranking results we had climbed back up to 8.
According to Google Queries we have had no impressions or clicks for our main terms for the last three days - I am hoping this is due to it needing time to catch up.... otherwise something is very wrong.
Due to the seasonality of our market, as soon as the weather is nice people go out in their motorhomes and caravans, this will also affect traffic to a degree.
NOTE - just looked in webmaster tools - this does only go up to the 27th of May not to the 30th so a couple of days behind.
-
Hi Tim,
Do you have Google Analytics installed? If so it should be possible to find out what's happening! This is what I'd do:
-
Get the 100 best performing keywords for january - march.
-
Get the 100 best performing keywords for the past two weeks.
-
see which keywords you used to get traffic on but currently don't get traffic on.
-
if you still rank for these keywords, it's probably because of search volumes and if you don't rank first page for these keywords it's because of your rankings. (probably).
Obviously it's a bit more tricky if your long tail rankings only dropped slightly. If that's the case you could try to find out for which keywords you used to get >10% of the search volume in visitors. It's higly likely that you used to rank top 3 for these words. If you rank 6th or 7th for these keywords now you probably lost some ground there.
Also you can checkout the search engine optimization feature in Google Analytics in case you have GA linked to your webmastertools.
This is why it's important to document your rankings over time (on lot's of keywords). You could use a ranktracker for that.
Best of luck!
Sven Witteveen
Expand Online
-
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
-
What kind of impact does a 404 have in a sitemap regarding ranking?
We recently had a site update where our robots file disallowed our sitemap for about two weeks. When we found the problem and resubmitted the sitemap to Google Search Console, it found a 404 error. Does this have any impact on ranking or visibility if we are still recovering from the disallow?
Algorithm Updates | | GaryBlanchard0 -
Is it a good idea to 301 redirect one same niche site towards another site for seo benefit
Hello friends, I have 2 android niche sites, one site is running on a technology dropped domain i catch 1 year ago it has, almost 400+ domains linking to different parts of the site, the other one i established from scratch and both are running from jan 2015. Now i want to redirect first site which already has 400 links pointing towards it to the home page of my 2nd android site. Is it a good idea to do so and does it give any boost in terms of seo?
Algorithm Updates | | RizwanAkbar0 -
50% drop in search, no changes to site over 2 days, no notifications, A rank...
My URL is: http://applianceassistant.com
Algorithm Updates | | applianceassistant
With no changes to my site, I suddenly experienced a huge drop in search queries on Aug1. Your company has still given me an overall rating of A. I just thought you may be able to help or be interested in my case due to it's strange nature. Due to some suggestions on the webmaster forums, I have disavowed all low quality back links to the site, and I am currently working through each page trying to make the key words a little less spammy. Here are some screen shots of the action...
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-WgXUf-lvUyg/U-nrWNgspPI/AAAAAAAAAEI/imoI190LUns/s1600/Analytics_081214.tiff
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-srmvn288rr0/U-pxlwoycVI/AAAAAAAAAEg/ckmyX_2Sl_Y/s1600/PAGES_AUG.tiff
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-DVCYxhkutbQ/U-pxpQVfYfI/AAAAAAAAAEo/MN9PiLFT-zs/s1600/pages_july.tiff This appears to be almost a 50% 2 year set back. Any ideas or suggestions are greatly appreciated0 -
Website Rankings Dropped April 12
A client website dropped drastically on April 12. Outside of some branded keywords, search results dropped off of the first page and are buried on page 3+ at best. Nothing has changed on the site, and there were no problems with the link profile. GWT has no manual actions. Kind of at a loss. Does anyone know if there was an algorithm update or anything external that may be causing some problems here? Site is www.averybiomedical.com if you want to take a look, but I'm just curious if there was anything I should be aware of. Thanks for the help!
Algorithm Updates | | AdamWormann0 -
Will increased pagerank increase traffic from google?
I got notified that my domain went from a google pagerank of 3 to 4. When this happens, does google raise me in the searches which can then hopefully get me more traffic, or is it a worthless number. Maybe only google knows 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | BrickPicker0 -
Does Site Size Influence Rank?
The Scenario:
Algorithm Updates | | kchandler
Currently one of my clients has 7-8 products that they sell on their website. For each product they have two different pages one with the product info and one with a video demo. So the pages began to split their authority as they began receiving new links. Since only one of the two pages for each product rank i suggested that we combine the two and redirect the video page to the product page to increases it's authority and rank. The Clients Response:
After explaining my reasoning and next steps the client mentioned that he thought a site's size was a ranking factor. I had never heard of this before so i told them i would do some research to prove my point, after a little digging around i am now even more confused. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-size-ranking-17044.html http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4591155.htm The Question:
Does a websites size/amount of content indexed in Google actually effect your sites ability to rank? I look forward to everyones feedback, thanks Kyle1 -
Did anyone else notice a DA Drop this week?
I have our site + 4 other competitors' sites in my SEOmoz campaigns and all of the DA's dropped by 1 or 2 points. Has anyone else noticed a drop this week? Two months ago, all of these websites also went down 1 or 2 DA points, then some of them came back up a point the next month. What's going on? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | pbhatt0 -
Site name appended to page title in google search
Hi there, I have a strange problem concerning how the search results for my site appears in Google. The site is Texaspoker.dk and for some strange reason that name is appended at the end of the page title when I search for it in Google. The site name is not added to the page titles on the site. If I search in Google.dk (the relevant search engine for the country I am targeting) for "Unibet Fast Poker" I get the following page title displayed in the search results: Unibet Fast Poker starter i dag - få €10 og prøv ... - Texaspoker.dk If you visit the actual page you can see that there is no site name added to the page title: http://www.texaspoker.dk/unibet-fast-poker It looks like it is only being appended to the pages that contains rich snippets markup and not he forum threads where the rich snippets for some reason doesn't work. If I do a search for "Afstemning: Foretrukne TOPS Events" the title appears as it should without the site name being added: Afstemning: Foretrukne TOPS Events Anybody have any experience regarding this or an idea to why this is happening? Maybe the rich snippets are automatically pulling the publisher name from my Google+ account... edited: It doesn't seem to have anything to do with rich snippets, if I search for "Billeder og stuff v.2" the site name is also appended and if I search for "bedste poker bonus" the site name is not.
Algorithm Updates | | MPO0