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
-
Please share the strategy how to find better organic keywords for hight traffic and low competition for "locksmith west palm beach"
Hi, I'm trying to find better high-volume and low-competition traffic keywords for my business. Can you share the strategy about volume and competition grade that are good for the keywords list that I'm planning to use for internal blog articles? I am just looking for more organic traffic. Thanks.
Keyword Research | | FIT0 -
Competing Pages for Ranking Keywords?
Hey there, My client has this existing page which ranks for rentals-related keywords that are product type specific - i.e. electric wheelchair rentals, mobility scooter rentals, etc. https://mobilityequipmentforless.com/pages/rentals I recently made a rentals page for each product type to try and really target those keywords that the rentals page is ranking for. Is this a problem? Is the potential nature of the pages competing for the keywords a real issue? Any help is appreciated. Thanks! Mike
Keyword Research | | naturalsociety0 -
How important is it to use a keyterm word-for-word to rank for that term?
I need your help to settle an argument here in our office. It boils down to improving our ranking for “driver education course Michigan.” One guy is convinced that if we want a site to rank for a multi-word keyterm like that, we need to use those exact words, in that order. He keeps creating pages with really awkward H1 titles and H2 subheadings using that exact phrase. H e claims appeal to search engines, but I think the cumbersome syntax is off-putting to any potential people who come to our site. Another guy claims that search engines are more sophisticated than that. He says we don’t need those exact words; it’s enough that the text on the page include “Michigan,” “driver education,” and “driver education course” a few times each. Even related terms like “drivers ed,” “driving school,” and “driver education classes” will help us to rank higher for “driver education course Michigan,” according to this guy. Neither of them can convince the other, and meanwhile I don’t know which to believe. Can you help?
Keyword Research | | dbcooper0 -
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 -
Question about ranking for long tail keywords
So I am looking at some long tail keywords for my web design company, for example: "website development and design company" The top results are websites that are not optimized for that specific keyword but about "web design & development" in general. The top ranking sites also have quite high PA with lots of links. If I were to create a page specifically about that term would it be fairly easy to rank for since the top ranking pages are not optimized for that keyword?
Keyword Research | | WebAdvancedUK0 -
What is the best method to get top 10 ranking ?
Most of my keywords are moderated and some a low competition.. but i want to know what is the proper way of doing SEO to get top 10 ranking in Google.... please help..
Keyword Research | | mamuti0 -
How to find easy keywords to rank for?
We've got fantastic results from a keyword here. After we signed up for SeoMoz, we found that, for luck, this was a very easy keyword (1%) to rank for. How can I find more easy keywords?
Keyword Research | | BrunoReis0 -
Big difference in rank on google.com and google.no
Hi Our E-com website went from 8th to 1st spot yesterday for our most important keyword (barneklær = childrens clothing) on google.no weirdly enough we arent ranking on first page at all on google.com . I find this very strange especially since the keyword itself is so country specific - mainly because of the norwegian specific letter - æ. The results are not due to personalization i ve check it with the keyword difficulty tool here on seomoz. The sites ranking higher then me on google.com are sites i am ranking higher then on google.no. Anyone got a good explanation ? The changes for my keyword in ranking i saw yesterday was alot more then i am used to see - almost like google made some sort of script change. we went from 8th to 1st. 1st dropped to 4th, 5ht went to 2nd etc - i am not used to seeing this big changes. Anyone got a clue to either of these 2 questions ?
Keyword Research | | danlae0