Rankings going up, traffic decreasing
-
Hi there,
I have been burned 3 times with shonky/bad SEO experts so was nervous about paying another company, so I am trying to learn SEO myself. My rankings are going up, but my traffic is at an all time low. This doesn't really make sense to me. Can anyone help me?
Thanks, Astrid
-
thank you for your insight. A whole lot I need to work on here.
-
Thanks for your help.
-
Thanks Logan. I will try these.
-
Depends on what rankings you're going up for. Have you done a keyword analysis on the keywords you're ranking better for? Ranking well for the term "blue kangaroo widgets" might sound awesome... until you realize nobody searches that term.
You might want to spend a little money on Adwords and play around with keywords to see what brings in actual traffic. More importantly, Google has been showing more ads above organic, so even if you rank #1, you might be #4 in the actual list behind ads. While the Keyword Estimator is good, real data is better. Moz also has the Keyword Difficulty Tool which can help you find keywords that are actually worth ranking for.
Lastly, are you tracking conversions? You need to be. Figure out what that incoming traffic is doing. Even if you bring them to your site, are they doing what you want them to?
-
Logan
I agree with Logan - Go through Webmaster Tools page by page and see if you can identify some traffic trends. It should not take too long. Click all four clicks, impressions, CTR and position. See what is happening on each page, then you can narrow it down by search term.
On WMT's I would also do a custom comparison for 90 days, ie 45 days each (compare). Or from when you noticed the trend - comparing with when you were ranking lower - only hiccup is only goes back 90 days.
Also I suggest Semrush you get a free use for one hit - i would pop your URL into Semrush and see what the graph for organic keywords looks like.
It is a bit of a puzzle but start with some basics and see how you go. Hope that assists.
-
Hi Astrid,
First things first, it's important to remember that the keywords you track are not the only keywords driving traffic to your site. It's entirely possible that people were finding your site by way of a keyword(s) that has actually dropped in rank that you're not monitoring.
A good way to gain some insight into what's bringing traffic to your site is through Google Search Console. Go to Search Traffic > Search Analytics. From there you can see things like position, CTR, impressions, and clicks based on queries. There are a number of ways you can slice data up here to give you some really good insights.
You can also take a look in Google Analytics at your landing page report for organic traffic and compare dates to see if there is any major differences in entry points to your site. This is a good way to determine topics people were searching to find your site. For example, if they enter from organic search on /blue-widgets they were probably searching for something related to that.
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
-
Domain keyword ranking
I used to use Searchmetrics (years ago) which enabled me to add in the domain name into their website, and it would provide all the keywords that rank for it. Does Moz do that do you know? Thanks
Keyword Research | | patn_studio0 -
Page not ranking despite indicators showing should easily be mid-1st page?
I have many years old website selling a service. The main keyword is 47% competitive, and we used to be #1 page 2, occasionally page 1 couple years back. Domain authority is double of any of the competitors on 1st page, followed root domain links is many times that of 1st page competitors, infact against some of them almost 10 times as much, MozRank and MozTrust higher too. Infact, every metric is higher than competition. Only metric which isn't as good is Followed vs NoFollowed links metric, 95% of our links are NoFollowed, but we are still #1 in external followed links. Yet we are stuck on 4th page, and on some localizations we are not even in Top 50. This has happened slowly over time, not a overnight thing. Page we are trying to rank for gets grade A for optimizations, yet we have less significant pages ranking higher for that keyword. Further, newer pages tend to rank better than old ones. The whole site actually ranks quite low and we are not even getting search traffic for long tail keywords.
Keyword Research | | PulsedMedia
No problems reported on GWT, Analytics etc. Is this a google penalization or something of the sort? How can i troubleshoot this and get past this?0 -
Branded vs Generic keywords - is Google treating their rank equaly!?
Several times I have noticed that website receiving sort of a rankings drop penalty for certain wrongly built on-page strategies that involves keyword stuffing, wrong keyword density(too much) etc. The question is - how you guys think - is branded keywords receiving the same treatment from Google then generic ones? And here is why - for one popular brand I see that they ranking for their brand keyword very high(1th) but keyword density is awful - more then 10%. So, my guess is - if this keyword density you would apply for generic keyword you will end up nowhere to be found for it! Is that could be truth? Any experiments info about that? thanks and regards, Jungles
Keyword Research | | Jungles0 -
Can't think of any keywords I'd want to rank for
I run a box-of-the-month subscription club for Japanese candy called "Candy Japan". Users sign up for $24 / month and then I start sending them products to try from Japan. I'm curious about SEO, but lack in imagination for terms I would even want to rank for. I already rank OK for "japanese candy", but people who search for that who click over to the site don't seem to convert. People who search for "candy japan" do convert (obviously), since it's clear they already know they want to subscribe. I started making content pages about specific candies, but those are not working. Firstly no-one knows the name of specific Japanese candies, so there isn't any search traffic for them. And even when I get some clicks, they don't convert because I am not selling those specific products (and am not interested in doing so) but rather my product is the subscription club itself. Any ideas on what kind of terms I might be able to find new converting club members from?
Keyword Research | | Bemmu0 -
Plummeting traffic and rankings for main KWs
Hi there mozzers, You have been so helpful in the past and we'd really appreciate your insights into our problem... we have two data recovery companies in the UK, one has been established for 11 years (dataclinic.co.uk) , the second (datlabs.co.uk) is a subsidiary that's been around for 5 years. Dataclinic has always ranked highly, usually in the top 1-5 on page one for relevant KWs and towards the end of last year we had traffic of approx 1,800 UK visitors/month - now we're down to only 600. Week on week we're falling and I have started to dread the monitoring checks. We're slipping in the rankings too. As our business relies almost 100% on Google rankings our phones just aren't ringing. In contrast our subsidiary company datlabs is climbing up the rankings and drawing more traffic - but unfortunately nothing like enough to compensate for the decline in the main company's traffic. We have used the same kinds of marketing strategies for both but have invested more energy into social for dataclinic, and more energy into local for datlabs. I'd say that our strategies have been less than sparkling clean - we've paid for directory links but not with the really spammy directories. We're at a loss to understand what has happened to have had such a dramatic and devastating effect - please help!! Thanks so much Sue
Keyword Research | | 3Amigos0 -
Informational pages, not product pages, are ranking for product-related keywords
My site sells products (+1000s) and we have a few pages about how-to's, tips, etc. But when you search for keywords that are relevant to the products, the guides show up as search results. For example, if we search for "red widgets", the page for "how to make widgets" shows in the SERP and not the "red widgets" product page. This doesn't make sense when most of the search results go to our guides and not to the product pages. How can I change this? Do I permanent remove these guides? Or rename the title, description? My guess is that other sites have linked to these guides so they are making our site more of a "guide" site as opposed to the products we sell. Any advice/recommended would be appreciated.
Keyword Research | | mof3kz0 -
Keyword Ranking Information
Recently I received an email from an SEO marketer with the following ranking information for my site (image attached) ( link to image http://imgur.com/CAo4D) I am sure he ran some sort of tool to this ... Is there any tool , which can give a list of low ranking articles in my site which have high search traffic CAo4D
Keyword Research | | iamnew1 -
How do you check your KW rankings?
I'm currently using the PRO campaigns to track my main keywords. However, I'm trying to do some research on KW opportunities, and having no luck finding a way to conveniently check rankings for new keywords. What tool do you use to get ranking results for large keyword lists?
Keyword Research | | AdoptionHelp0