Organic Traffic: Hockey-stick growth followed by slow rampdown of death!
-
My site, Site Builder Report, was started last year.
Months 1 - 6 saw modest organic traffic growth.
Months 6 - 9 saw explosive organic traffic growth.
Months 9 - 12 have seen a steady decrease in organic traffic.(I've attached a graph for visualizing this)
The site has not changed much over this time. In fact, in the last 3 months, I've done two things to try to get organic traffic trending upwards again:
- Increased the amount of long-form articles on the site (from 1 new article every 3 weeks to 1 new article every week)
- Fixed approxately 150 five hunded (500) errors in Google Webmaster Tools three weeks ago (converted them to 404s)
Neither fix has really been able to change the trend (although perhaps it's too early to tell with the fixing of errors).
Does this downtrend warrant concern? It's having significant business effects- would hiring an SEO consultant be the next step for reversing this trend? Any thoughts?
-
... killing me Steven ; )
It is really tough to say; however, I typed "website builder reviews" into Google Trends and it looks like there was a drop in searches for that terminology in March, which would correspond to what I am seeing on your graph.
Mike
-
I thought your graph displayed traffic and not rankings, how are you SERPs did they drop? Or are you still ranking in the same position for your keywords?
Because if the rankings are the same, it could be (I know generally this gets sorted out within first few months) but could be the issue of google still trying to figure out where to rank you: http://www.linkbuildr.com/reasons-why-new-pages-rank-well-then-drop/
-
Hi Vladim! I'm not sure I know what you mean- I attached a graph that might help visualize how the rankings have changed over time
-
Thanks Mike, sorry the post may be a bit unclear. I meant "Hockey Stick" as a metaphor.
The website actually targets keywords such as "website builders", "website builder reviews"
-
Hi Steven,
How are your rankings have they changed?
-
Hi Steven,
My guess would be you are seeing the downtrend, because of the season.
Here is the data I pulled from Google Trends for "hockey stick" - as you can see, the peaks tend to be in December and January for the year.
My guess things will be slow until next year when the season picks back up.
Hope this helps.
Mike
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
-
Noindex follow on checkout pages in 2017
Hi,
Algorithm Updates | | DGAU
My website really consists of 2 separate sites. Product site:
• Website with product pages.
• These product pages have SEO optimised content. Booking engine & checkout site:
• When a user clicks 'Book' on one of the product pages on the aforementioned product site they go to a seaparate website which is a booking engine and checkout.
• These pages are not quality, SEO optimised content, they only perform the function of booking and buying. Q1) Should I set 'noindex follow' via the meta tag on all pages of the 'Booking engine and checkout' site?
ie. Q2) should i add anything to the book buttons on the product site? I am hoping all this will somehow help concentrate the SEO juice onto the Product Site's pages by declaring the Booking engine and Checkout sites pages to be 'not of any content value'.0 -
Anyone else notice a traffic drop around June 28th 2016?
Hey guys, i know there is a lot of chatter about a potential google update on / around June 28th... well, one of the sites I manage was hit pretty bad. I have attached an image showing what our ranking looked like before and after the unconfirmed update. As you will see, we plummeted that day and have not yet recovered. Has anyone else experienced drops? I'm trying to identify potential causes. I've started an SEO audit and so far I have identified 1 big fish and a few niggly bits. Big Fish: non-www version of site had redirect rule overwritten by CloudFlare page rules and is using a 302 redirect instead of a 301. Now could this be the cause? Niggly bits: technical SEO issues and optimisations like having unique meta titles etc. If you have noticed drops or think you can shed some light on my situation that will help me then I would love to hear from you 🙂 Thanks upload.png upload.png
Algorithm Updates | | OptiBacUK0 -
Whats the best method to tackle website traffic drop?
ON 14th November following a DNS error (which seems to have been a google error as local servers were not effected and it happened to many people everywhere) my traffic started dropping. Within 5 days it was down 50%. In a panic to resolve the situation I thought it was because i was on a shared host and moved to VPS which was a disaster. Ive had server errors since. After desperately looking everywhere for news on the DNS error and whether there as algorithm change etc I decided i should have a look at my site @ www.mutantspace.com and see if there were any internal issues. In Google Webmaster forum a helpful moderator suggested that I do 2 things: 1. Deal with the fact that I had keyword stuffed my <alt tags="">. Basically i run an arts blog so have 8 - 10 images per post and was putting the same text in each one i.e [artists name][artform][name of artwork]. I stupidly didnt realise what i had been doing and have since been deleting my alt tags for every image except one per post. However i have 17,000 images so its going to take a while. </alt> 2. She also linked me to https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/http%253A%252F%252Fwww.mutantspace.com%252F and wondered why i had such volatile inbound links. I dont know why. And cant figure it out As far as everything else goes I dont know what I could be doing wrong to deserve penalty - if it is a penalty. I dont back link so all my links are natural (from artists, galleries, art blogs, tumblrs, etc) I dont sell advertising (yet anyway) Having said that ive been told i have too many links on each page (i run a wordpress site and so have categories, etc) so im wondering if i should nofollow my categories? In short im wondering what advice anyone has on doing a systematic shake up of my site. Im currently doing the following: 1. deleting most of the <alt tags="">on my posts. Ive got back as far as 2012 and will keep going til theyre all done.</alt> 2. Redirecting all crawl errors 3. No Following more outbound links and links to social networks 4. Checking all inbound links to see if there is an suspicious domains 5. Sorting out the fact that ive had numerous server errors for the last 2 weeks (would that affect SERPS?) Is there anything else i can do? Should do? much appreciated
Algorithm Updates | | mutant20080 -
Guest Blog Post or Article Content Should be Do-Follow or No-Follow Link ? Help Plz !
Many SEO writers and blogs after Google Matt Cutt said, You should not allow no-follow link in Guest Post. What should we do. ? I am allowing Guest post - what they ask in return a do-follow link to their site or blog. other articles or post i wrote about inspiration collected from different source or single portfolio site - i credit them(as blogger - we should respect them). What i am doing right or wrong ? Please advise and help me on this ! http://searchengineland.com/google-guest-blogging-for-links-you-better-nofollow-those-links-166218
Algorithm Updates | | Esaky0 -
Giving Follow Links is good for SEO ?
Hi Friends, In my website I am having PR 5 for my home page and I am giving 25 external links as follow link. Reason is all links are natural links so I gave as follow links. Will my website will be decrease PR in future. 1) Should I need to give as nofollow links? 2) Can I update only for reciprocal links as nofollow? In total 25 links I have 3 reciprocal links only. Your suggestions on this are important for me. I had watched couple of videos from Matt Cutts on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4UJS-LFRTU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g37bwBlifnk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg1A5wF3Ac4 Thanks for your valuable time.
Algorithm Updates | | zco_seo0 -
Is there a direct correlation between google places and organic listing ?
Basically, I have examined several examples that the sites which are included in Google places are not listed in organic results in page 1. For example, If my site is listed in google places. is it going to affect my ranking for the same keyword?.
Algorithm Updates | | Abith0 -
How to find which keywords bring traffic to a particular page on my website ?
I have been using Google Analytics and SEOMoz tools for a while now. I know which are my top landing pages and some of the keywords which bring me traffic. But I don't know which are the top searched keywords for my website as these are "not provided" by Google Analytics. More importantly, I want to know which keywords are directing traffic to a particular page on my website. Can anyone help ?
Algorithm Updates | | EricMoore0 -
Paid for Directory Listings and no-follows
Was just about to book an advert in a directory until the salesperson told me that the directory listing would be replicated over 40 times, from different websites (they white label the directory to different sites, who then sell their own adverts in the directory). I asked them whether they did nofollows - they didn't know what they were, so clearly not. I'm thinking 40 plus identical links coming through (over 10% of total links to site) could attract punishment from Google. Your thoughts would be welcome. Thanking you in advance, Luke
Algorithm Updates | | McTaggart0