Massive drop in traffic, recently.
-
We have been focusing on Local SEO and quality, original content and social media. Over the past 4 weeks we have seen sharp declines in our impressions and overall traffic to the site.
Crawler does not reveal any new massive issues, index is growing and there are no penalties.
Where do we begin to troubleshoot?
-
Hi Greenstone!
Great questions from everyone in the community here! I will add, from a purely local perspective, you might want to be sure you've got all these ducks in a row:
http://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures
Hope you'll come back with further details, based on the the questions the community has put forth!
-
Could it just be seasonality? Is the total search volume for your key terms likely to drop at this time of year? I always see about a 35% reduction in traffic from Thanksgiving to February. No one typically buys my products in the winter months. Is that a possibility?
-
Does any of it tie in with the utter craziness of a drunken penguin (starting on thanksgiving) - http://algoroo.com/ (seems to show the best results compared to some other algo pages) also some dates here http://searchengineland.com/holidays-google-breaks-updates-rules-gives-fresh-penguin-updates-210367
More info & dates you can give us the more we can help i'm sure.
-
Can you see based on your landing pages which pages declined most and if there are any pages that had a bigger drop than others? That would be the first stop for me followed by looking at the keyword volumes and trends to see if it could just be a seasonal trend or not.
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
-
Ranking Dropped Off for HOMETOWN + BRAND
I work with a number of local businesses that generally rank well for the query "HOMETOWN + BRAND." The brand is not the business name. In late August, three of these businesses (all located in the same large US city and owned by the same parent company) stopped ranking for this important keyword. They were all in pos. 1 before., and now they're not on the first 5 pages. There are no issues or errors recorded in Search Console, rankings haven't shifted dramatically for any other keywords and the GMB listing is fully filled out and completely accurate. I'm banging my head trying to figure out how to fix this issue and start seeing my page 1 rankings again. Also, I'm not sure if it's related but I have seen a significant increase in organic traffic from a city within the same state that's about 3.5 hours away. I thought maybe there was something on the sites telling Google they're located in the wrong city, but I'm not seeing anything. Any suggestions or ideas? Any help would be extremely appreciated!
Local Website Optimization | | LocalSEOLady0 -
Raise in ranking but drop in visibility, also question about wordpress themed SEO
Hello,
Local Website Optimization | | SharonEKG
my first question is, i started working in August on a website for furniture repair and services that is a local business and who ever setup the website and did the SEO before me implanted the front page content and many other pages in the theme itself, we got Yoast premium and i mostly get bad rank of the page both from Yoast and Moz im guessing because it is simply cant find the links and content that is on the page since it is in the theme code. should i recommend the company to do a makeover and move everything to the actual wordpress page?
Also many changes has been made to the website, too many to track and i have seen in the past month an continues drop lower and lower of our visibility, but yet in the past week and half huge jump in some rankings. some of them are for hard to rank keywords, a jump of sometime 20/30+ up the ranks.
since i dont have a track of all the changes has been made, is there a way to know what cause it? Also one last question,
i have implemented google tag manager and been configuring it for the past month and now i have finally getting close to track all metrics we would like to track, i have removed all google analytics codes that i knew of and managed to find through search through the theme and plugins but yet when i fire up tag assistant it shows two codes the tag manager and analytics, i know it could interfear each other or give false/double readings. is there a way to track it and remove it? i have went through all theme files.. and cant find it.. Thanks!0 -
Boost Website Traffic
Tom Beavan Websites is my business where I create and design affordable websites for small businesses in Wordpress. I am looking to improve my traffic to my website as dramatically as possible. At present, my website is a one-page website with limited content - https://www.tombeavan.co.uk. My website ranks #1 for local keywords like: Web design Wiltshire Web design Trowbridge Wordpress developer UK So in terms of keyword position, I am doing well for local business but I only get 200-300 visitors per month. I would like to dramatically improve this to improve the number of enquiries I get. I do tend to get a few enquiries but think if I improve the website traffic, the quantity of website enquiries will increase too? I have a long list of tasks I would like to do for SEO: Add a lot more content to the website Add more backlinks Guest blogging Lots more What would you recommend a good starting place or a place which will increase traffic effectively? Thanks for your advice in advance 🙂
Local Website Optimization | | tombeavan0 -
Any ideas on how to stop a massive spam link building attack?
I have a client that got penalized back in April, 2015, after doing a lot of research around what it might be, we finally narrowed it down to bad link building. It looks like the site started getting attacked by some sort of automated spam link building attack back in 2013. Examples of the bad links are listed below. Thousands of links coming from Pinterest - all different boards. The links come from pinterest.se and pinterest.com. Thousands from footer links from a website template. Some of the links make it looks like this client build the website (which they did not) and some of the links are in black lettering on a black background (hidden from the naked eye). New links come in every day and range from 10 - 150 new spam links, and the majority of the pages the links are on are foreign. I know I can disvow some of the links (like the ones in the footer of the website template), but I wouldn't want to disvow Pinterest, right? With all of this info, does anyone have any ideas on what action we should take next? Thanks ahead of time!
Local Website Optimization | | Annapurna-Digital0 -
Dropping Lower and Lower
So, a little history here, my site is 10 years old, each year I do a theme change to keep things fresh. Over time the site has gone from static html/php to wordpress optimized with yoast seo. I target the area of college station texas mainly but have had clients find me from california to australia. My site has a DA of 26 and a PA of 36 for the homepage and the internal pages range pretty wide.i've tried to go after local keywords since I know that I'm still optimizing for the base keywords even if I can't rank high for them. I have trimmed down some content over the years and used 301 redirects where needed. I try to keep my landing pages above 800 words and for blogs I try to go for 2000+ words. I have my nap with microdata on the site and this matches my info on google places/google+, facebook, and several other sites including the moz local sites. I do not list a physical address but have my business listed as a service that goes to the client. I mainly offer web design services so my keywords are items such as "web design college station tx". For a long time my site was typically the #1 to #3 spot. This was before the personalized results and when that rolled out I was typically still on the first page when using a private window or a remote checking site. My traffic has been pretty bad, in the early days it was typically around 75-100 a day but not I'm lucky to get between 7-12 visits a day. most of these tend to be for software I sell and not for my design services. I have several social signals on my pages but I don't have a consistent social media or blog posting schedule. I've never been victim to a manual penalty and I keep tabs on my backlinks and my competitors but I'm at a loss here as to how to beat out my competition. I'm considering creating pages for each local market and doing original content for each but I've never seen much result from this in the past. I'm also considering doing facebook ads as well. Any ideas on this?
Local Website Optimization | | spyke011 -
Our rankings are all over the place but mostly keywords are dropping
our rankings are all over the place but mostly keywords are dropping from 2-20 to 35 and over 51. it has been happening over the past 3 weeks but don't know what to look for. any advise is appreciated. stevesautorepairva.com . our other automotive website hometownetire.com seems to be doing better but do not know why. they are 2 separate businesses. Thank you very much in advance for any help. AqDQnRx
Local Website Optimization | | ifixcars0 -
Massive duplicate content should it all be rewritten?
Ok I am asking this question to hopefully confirm my conclusion. I am auditing a domain who's owner is frustrated that they are coming in #2 for their regionally tagged search result and think its their Marketer/SEOs fault. After briefly auditing their site, the marketing company they have doing their work has really done a great job. There are little things that I have suggested they could do better but nothing substantial. They are doing good SEO for the most part. Their competitor site is ugly, has a terrible user experience, looks very unprofessional, and has some technical SEO issues from what I have seen so far. Yet it is beating them every time on the serps. I have not compared backlinks yet. I will in the next day or so. I was halted when I found, what seems to me to be, the culprit. I was looking for duplicate content internally, and they are doing fine there, then my search turned externally...... I copied and pasted a large chunk of one page into Google and got an exact match return.....rutro shaggy. I then found that there is another site from a company across the country that has identical content for possibly as much as half of their entire domain. Something like 50-75 pages of exact copy. I thought at first they must have taken it from the site I was auditing. I was shocked to find out that the company I am auditing actually has an agreement to use the content from this other site. The marketing company has asked the owners to allow them to rewrite the content but the owners have declined because "they like the content." So they don't even have authority on the content for approximately 1/2 of their site. Also this content is one of three main topics directed to from home page. My point to them here is that I don't think you can optimize this domain enough to overcome the fact that you have a massive portion of your site that is not original. I just don't think perfect optimization of duplicate content beats mediocre optimization of original content. I now have to convince the owners they are wrong, never an easy task. Am I right or am I over estimating the value of original content? Any thoughts? Thanks in advance!
Local Website Optimization | | RossM0 -
Why a site just dropped out of ranks
I have a site i am working on link It was ranking fairly well and then I added content to the homepage to better optimize it for the keywords it was already ranking for. Ever since I did that the entire site is no longer ranking well. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | Atomicx0