90% Traffic Drop...

[hendersondavidp]

Hey Moz Community

Our team has been racking our collective brains about a 90% drop in traffic a niche client of ours has seen.  The traffic drop occurred September 20th.  The site averages 300-400 unique visits a month (very targeted & niche) & dropped to 30-40 uvm.

The domain is on an exact match but other then that I can't see anything that would be deserving of such a significant drop in traffic.  Our campaign had been performing very well & we were seeing steady gains in traffic & ranking over the long term until September 20th.

I'm curious if the exact match update would have such a big impact months after it was released (July/July if I remember correctly).  I also didn't think it could be such a big issue because that domain has been used by us for a couple years.

Is the Exact Domain Match such a big deal?

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[Vizergy]

Nice - I didn't consider an issue with reporting.

[hendersondavidp]

We've never checked the server logs but I'm going to put in a request for that.  Analytics hasn't been touched & we've checked to ensure it's correctly installed.

Unfortunately the client has seen a drop in leads & sales.

[hendersondavidp]

Again great thoughts & questions.  We have a few years worth of analytics & the vertical type is bankruptcy (chapter 11).  There is seasonality but not at this particular time of year & we've never seen a drop that was this significant.

From a ranking standpoint we'd never actually gotten to page one but we'd seen a very steady climb & traffic was starting from zero when the site was launched.  So there was no rank drop per but we weren't on page one.

No other marketing at the time & certainly nothing that could have impacted traffic.

We've started to see a very slow increase in traffic so we'll monitor it closely & continue to do the best work we can.

[KeriMorgret]

Was there any work done to the site on that date? Could GA code have not been put on some of the pages? Could there have been duplicate codes that had been inflating the numbers that were removed? Do you have access to awstats or some other form of server log files to check for a corresponding drop there? Have your leads and sales changed?

Just want to narrow down that we are looking at a traffic drop and not a reporting issue.

[Vizergy]

I would check Google Trends for a possible drop in search volume for your targeted terms.  I am not sure how long you have had this site up and running but you may just have hit a seasonality drop (we see this with hotels) and you may simply need to wait it out.  You may consider deepening your 'bucket' of phrases if there are relevant terms for which you are not targeting that may still be receiving some decent search volume.

Because you have not dropped in ranking for the specific term I am confident in saying this has nothing to do with your exact match domain - any penalty would have been to your rankings which would have effected traffic but Google can not cut out the middle man - they can't keep you where you are in the rankings but still control your traffic amount.

Hmmmm - that makes me wonder - have you narrowed the traffic loss down to search engines?  Were you perhaps running some other type of marketing that may have been driving direct or referral traffic that you have stopped?

[hendersondavidp]

Good question, no there hasn't been a drop for the exact match keyword specifically.  It may be important to note that we've focussed on a bucket of 25-30 phrases that are similar & relevant.

I've been insisting the same thing as you mention here, the exact match doesn't give you the boost it once did but I've never seen a "penalty".  This is where I believe that Google is letting us down, without a penalty it becomes incredibly difficult to see an issue.

[Vizergy]

Is there any correlation with ranking drop for the exact match keyword (or any other keywords for that matter)?  I know that exact match domains may not get the boost they used to but I certainly don't recall seeing any penalties.