How can we improve our traffic?

[Starfish_Volunteers]

Hi everyone, thanks for taking a look at this. We are looking at improving our traffic for our website. We are a tour company based in Thailand that caters to 18-25 year olds, mainly in the UK and USA.

Our site is - http://www.starfishvolunteers.com/

A few years ago the now ex-team hired an SEO company who outsourced to a team in India. Things were considered to be going very well in terms of traffic but I suspect that a lot of it was shady link building tactics. The site was designed poorly, urls were a mess and there was a lot of misinformation on there. Fast forward a few years and there is a new team in place, we redesigned the site, added a blog & booking system, cleared out the misinformation and got ourselves a Moz Pro subscription.

I only have Google search stats starting from 2013 and the total traffic (sessions) for that year was roughly 25,000. In 2014 traffic dropped to 19,000 and for the first five month of this year we are currently at 9,000.

Obviously reduced traffic doesn't look good and we would very much like to get our numbers back up.

We are tracking keywords in Moz and although we are ranking in the top 10 for a bunch of them the traffic just isn't going back up.

Here are our thoughts on why we might be losing traffic -

• We're targeting the wrong keywords.
• We are being penalised.
• The competition overtook us.

Right now we are at a bit of a loss because we don't know what direction to head in. Could it be our keywords? We would love to know what you think and sincerely appreciate the feedback. We will try and share any data that you think might be relevant or useful.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Have you checked in Search Console to see if you have a manual action? That will tell you right away if you have been penalized or if you have any major site issues.

I would take a look at your backlinks - I see some directories and questionable links in Majestic. Also, when I checked SEMRush, I can see a pretty significant dip (attached) in May 2012, which was around the time that Penguin 1.1 hit.

I would also take a look at your on-site SEO, especially with your information architecture. Right now, a lot your site architecture is flat, meaning everything lives off the root domain.

Run through your site's metrics, including Domain Authority, and see what opportunities you have in improvement. Take a look at your content and take an empathetic stance with your audience - if you were a user or customer, what would you want to see? Does that line up with your research?

Take a look at the Academy section as well for Moz - lots of opportunities! Also, try doing some competitive analysis to see if you are missing opportunities that your competition is taking advantage of!

Hope this all helps! Good luck to you!

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[ClaytonJ]

Had a very quick look.  There is plenty to do.  I have not looked from a technical side - Moz should do that for you, highlight deficiencies. I would suggest a keyword review.  ie you are not on the first page in the US according to Semrush for your prime keyword phrases - volunteer thailand etc.  So I would undertake a keyword analysis identify what you want - if that is it.

Best starting point is this blog post from Moz. https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

Also is Thailand as a volunteer destination this year as popular as it was a few years ago?  Anyway you should focus on improving your ranking regardless.

So without doing much more work, as the keyword research is an internal - cant really assist - i would review you Title and H1 tags.  Not sure I would start with affordable for your title & use the word experience. "Volunteering in Thailand" - maybe the optimum way but as said. There are 1000 things you could do, but in short i would start with keyword research in your instance, assume moz has crawled your site and you are addressing those issues.

Then build a strategy from there.

Good luck let me know if can assist further.

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