SEO direction - help needed
-
Hi,
I've been working on a site for about 5 years. We built the traffic up to about 8k visitors/day.
Although now it's dropped down over the past 2 years to about 2k visitors a day.
New traffic source is mainly from SEO longtail.
The whole time we have been working to improve the site.
What's the best way to get some help from experts on the right direction to get traffic back up or to at least tell me the site will never work
Thanks in advance.
M
-
Thanks Matt, Joey, Joseph and Keszi for your feedback.
I will investigate and see what I can come up with.
I will update any progress.
Cheers
M
-
Hi Mark,
The guys have mentioned quite good answers above, so I am not going to elaborate on that.
I just wanted to jump in with a tool for the algorithm diagnosis: http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
It helped me a lot to see which update has hit one of the sites I have been working on.
I hope it will help you as much, as did with me.
Gr., Keszi
-
Good advice Matt,
Mark, look at your traffic over the time period i question. Then pull up Moz's list of algorithm updates ( http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change ) See if your substantial drop in traffic correlates to any of the updates to help determine if you got a specific penalty problem. This could be an eye opener to discover what could be a bigger potential problem than you initially thought or never knew about at all.
If the traffic drop was slowly over time, I would also check your keyword rankings over time. It may be as simple as more and more of your competitors are catching up on the seo work . Slowly out ranking you and getting a big share of your previous traffic.
I would definitely check the algorithms in relation to the traffic drops.
Hope that helps,
Joe
-
What was the quality of the traffic you used to have? Were you getting good conversion?
Matt's comments are great. I'd also add that with the info you shared (mainly the timing), your traffic was possibly from rankings propped up by bad links? I'd do a thorough link audit if you haven't already, and simultaneously start brainstorming some great user-focused content that targets those short tail keywords with volume. If you feel the need to hire an expert, the Moz Recommended list is a great place to go. http://moz.com/community/recommended
Whoa! When did that list get so big??
-
Hey Mark,
It's hard to say with the info you've provided but were you hit with one of the many Google algorithm updates that tanked your traffic at once or did it slowly just go away? What were you doing differently then? I know a lot of small businesses that were blogging like mad for a long time then stopped and shockingly, traffic dropped as their content activities stopped. When they resumed, readership didn't immediately pick back up so they got frustrated & stopped again. All that on again, off again, on again is definitely not going to help.
If you were affected with some sort of Google zoo animal, you'll probably want to get professional help getting it sorted. 6000 traffic lost is just SO much. If you need anything further, please do let me know!
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
-
Help article / Knowledge base SEO consideration
Hi everyone, I am in the process of building the knowledge base for our SaaS product and I am afraid it could impact us negatively on the SEO side because of: Thin content on pages containing short answers to specific questions Keyword cannibalisation between some of our blog articles and the knowledge base articles I didn't find much on the impact of knowledge bases on SEO when I searched on Google. So I'm hoping we can use this thread to share a few thoughts and best practices on this topic. Below is a bit more details on the issues I face, any tips on how to address them would be most welcome. 1. Thin content: Some articles will have thin content by design: the H1 will be a specific question and there will be only 2 or 3 lines of text answering it in the article. I think creating a dedicated article per question is better than grouping 20 questions on one article from a UX point of view, because this will enable us to direct users more quickly to the answer when they use the live search function inside the software (help widget) or on the knowledge base (saves them the need to scrolling a long article to find the answer). Now the issue is that this will result in lots of pages with thin content. A workaround could be to have both a detailed FAQ style page with all the questions and answers, and individual articles for each question on top of that. The FAQ style page could be indexed in Google while the individual articles would have either a noIndex directive or a rel canonical to the FAQ style page. Have any of you faced similar issues when setting-up your knowledge base? Which approach would you recommend? 2.Keyword cannibalisation: There will be, to some extend, a level of keyword cannibalisation between our blog articles (which rank well) and some of the knowledge base articles. While we want both types of articles to appear in search, we don't want the "How to do XYZ" blog article containing practical tips to compete with the "How to do XYZ in the software" knowledge base article. Do you have any advice on how to achieve that? Having a specific Schema.org (or equivalent) type of markup to differentiate between the 2 types of articles would have been ideal but I couldn't find anything relating to help articles specifically when I searched.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tbps0 -
Help in Internal Links
Which link attribute should be given to internal links of website? Do follow or No follow and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
What can you do about negative SEO?
We have a list of 240 domains (look exactly the same) linking to our site for a certain keyword. over 3000 links in total. It means that 50% of our keywords are this keyword and it's not a branded keyword which can affect us in the long term. I have done a WHOIS search and found a name, email and number. Vikas Kumar. I linkedin searched him and found his "legit" SEO site which has EXACTLY the same registration details as the spam sites. I emailed him and he said it would cost 5$ a link removal. I phoned him and he DENIED these emails. He then denied owning these sites etc. We have disavowed them but the anchor text % is still affecting us. Is there anything we can do? I know negative SEO isn't illegal but it's really frustrating. Anyone else had any problems with this type of thing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyB_UK1 -
SEO Behind a paywall.
Good Morning! Does anybody have any experience with SEO behind a paywall. If we have a portion of a website that is going to be locked, will google still be able to access all of that regardless of paying? If not is there any way to circumvent that? Any thoughts are greatly appreciated! MOZel Tov!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
SEO and Internal Pages
Howdy Moz Fans (quoting Rand), I have a weird issue. I have a site dedicated to criminal defense. When you Google some crimes, the homepage comes up INSTEAD of the internal page directly related to that type of crime. However, on other crimes, the more relevant internal page appears. Obviously, I want the internal page to appear when a particular crime is Googled and NOT the homepage. Does anyone have an explanation why this happens? FYI: I recently moved to WP and used a site map plugin that values the internal pages at 60% (instead of Weebly, which has an auto site map that didn't do that). Could that be it? I have repeatedly submitted the internal pages via GWT, but nothing happens. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Video seo stats
I've come across various places that give statistics for things like "Video search results have a higher click-through than plain text results. " and
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordon_Hall
"Video is 50 times more likely to get organic page ranks in Google than plain text results" How true are these and does anyone have a definitive guide to video SEO?0 -
International SEO and Server Hosting
I am quite new to international SEO. I have a customer who wants to use the same website content on various domains targeting different countries. Such as; xxxx.hk - same content targeting Hong Kong xxxx.co.uk - same content targeting UK xxxx.de - same content targeting Germany I found that it could be possible with the Google suggested hreflang without any duplicate content problem. Is that true? Could someone explain this for me. Another question; if above is true do we need to make other adjustments as well. Such as; Any adjustments in Google Webmaster Tools (for each domain) Server location, does that really make a difference? Can we host each of the domains on the same server or should we seperate them and host each one on the country it is targeting ? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stradiji0 -
Need help or explanation on my site!
My site has suffered greatly since the recent Google update. I have done everything as suggested. I have had all bad links removed over 2 months ago. I have lowered keyword density (not easy since the keyword is in our company name!). I have rewritten various content and bolstered our existing content. What gives? What can I do? As an example the keyword, "maysville plumber" - I rank about 40th for this keyword. The first three pages are filled with websites with literally NO content or no added value. Maysville is a town of about 1k residents - there is no competition. Before the update I was #1 for years on this particular keyword. And this is the case with 35 other cities (mostly small cities, but a few larger ones). Please help me understand or suggest what I can possibly do at this point. We have hundreds of pages of unique content on each and every page. We have zero duplicate content (I have ran tests and crawlers). We have no fishy links. I have not gotten any messages from google on Webmasters. PLEASE HELP!! I asked a similar question a little while back and fixed all of the suggestions. My site is www.akinsplumbing.net.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chuckakins0