SEO traffic to the homepage is down across sites
-
Week over week, I've noticed that organic traffic (and oftentimes revenue) for the homepage are down across most of our sites compared to last year. Brand search interest is down for a number of the brands, but in a lot of these cases, it's not down so much that it would make sense for how much the homepage is down (for example: brand search interest was down 4% last week compared to last year, but the homepage traffic was down 32% in visits).
What I've done is generate entry page reports (this year vs. last year) and then bucket the pages by homepage, category pages, and product pages. In most cases, category pages are up year over year for traffic and revenue. I'm concerned that the homepage being down is more than a brand heat issue, but I haven't come across anything out of the ordinary in Google Search Console and keywords are pretty consistent in performance for the most part. Branded keywords continue to rank at #1, too.
Any thoughts as to what else I can look into?
-
Hey WWW SEO,
It seems to me that the pages' implementations seem correct, so it doesn't appear to be a tracking-based issue.
Have you taken to top terms that are driving traffic to these pages (Google Search Console or internal data if you have it) and plotted them in Google Trends to see how they compare over the past 24 months or so? Some may not be high-enough volume, but those that are should give you a feel for where the the volume stands in YoY comparison.
Regards,
Trenton -
Hi Trenton -
Sure. Here are the 2 that I'm most waiting to anniversary the platform launch for: http://bit.ly/1XgbhtZ and http://bit.ly/1Xvikzl.
I've also seen http://bit.ly/1XvivuF take a hit in homepage traffic (mobile traffic to the homepage is down more than desktop. The desktop vs. mobile performance is kind of a case by case situation, since I haven't really seen any patterns that encompass all brands).
Thanks!
-
WWW SEO,
Mind dropping us a link to the website in question so we can take a closer look? This will allow me to check your tracking implementation and to do a quick check on other factors that may be causing an issue here.
Thanks!
Trenton -
Hey Matt! I'm still trying to figure this out. I'm wondering if it's in part a tracking "issue" or inconsistency. I was looking through both desktop and mobile traffic and they are both down, so it's not like one or the other is the main driver. Organic traffic contribution continues to be down year over year.
Before we moved our sites over to the new platform, some traffic had been directed to a Country Selection page (I can't remember all the details behind this at the moment). When comparing year over year data (we use Omniture), we're including traffic that came through the Country Selection page and went through to the US site. I don't know if there's something with this particular page, or if we are indeed comparing apples to apples by leaving it in (without it, homepage is up. Category pages are generally up across all brands).
Still a lot of digging to do and I keep coming up at dead ends, it seems.
-
Hi WWW SEO! How is this going? We'd love an update.
-
What is direct traffic doing?
And have does mobile organic compare to desktop organic year-on-year?
-
I can take a closer look into competitors and see what's going on there. The way our meta descriptions are structured is first a call out of "official site" (we've noticed a better CTR by calling this out in both organic and paid), action verb, targeted keywords, and "Free shipping". In more of a consumer-friendly flow, but that's the basic structure of call outs.
-
You could perhaps ignore the brand search interest, or the keywords that are being searched by Google and instead look at what your site is actually delivering.
What about your meta descriptions? Use them like a sales pitch & compare them to the other search results. I have found it is often the case that sites lose traffic in circumstances like this when a competitor ups the game & grabs more attention.
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
-
Technical SEO - Where to begin?
Hi all, I'm looking to learn more about technical SEO. My background was digital marketing/PR where I learned the importance of links, of anchor text, of page speed, of improving UX signals, of SSL, utilising things like Google My Business etc. However, I find I am chasing my tail when it comes to things like understanding JS/CSS/log file analysis etc. I've tried reading so many articles on the subjects and I just find it so damn confusing. AnugalarJS/BackboneJS. Fetching & rendering, URL parameters...etc. I know from my own experiments that JS pages struggle to rank and I've created two very similar pages, one without JS, one with JS (which had far more links) and the non-JS page ranked far higher. So, I suppose I'm asking for some help with how to begin learning this stuff. I find the articles on Moz, Search Engine Land etc to be a bit confusing...maybe I'm not technically minded enough! Cheers, Rhys
Technical SEO | | SwanseaMedicine0 -
Tracing Redirects to a Site
I wonder if anyone has used any tools where you can trace the redirects pointing to a site? I know there are a number of tools out there that can be used to check where a URL redirects to, but I was wondering if anyone has used a tool where I could trace all redirects with the final URL? I am using this for competitor research so I don't have access to Analytics or Webmaster Tools.
Technical SEO | | BeattieGroup0 -
What is the best way to refresh a webpage of a news site, SEO wise?
Hello all, we have a client which is a sports website. In fact it is a veyr big website and has a huge number of news per day. This is mostly the reason why it refreshes some of its pages with news list every 420 seconds. We currently use meta refresh. I have read here and elsewhere that meta refreshes should be avoided. But we don't do it to send to another page and pass any kind of page authority / juice. Is in this case javascript refresh better? Is there any other better way. What do you think & suggest? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | pkontopoulos0 -
Site Map Problems or Are They?
According to webmaster tools my Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt Our site map is generically generated and encompasses all web pages, whether I have excluded them using the robots.txt file As far as I am aware this has never been an issue until recently. Is this hurting my rankings and how do I fix it? Secondly, webmaster tools says there is over 5,000 error/warnings on my site map. But site map is only 1,400 or so pages submitted. How do I see what is going on?
Technical SEO | | Professor0 -
Help optimising this site
Hi I have been optimising this site http://seakayakdevon.co.uk/ which is a wordpress site since making changes to it recently the site is now indexed and appearing among its competitors. trouble is they still are placed higher rn the SE rankings. i wish to optimise for local search i.e on Google places etc. but the trouble is there is'nt a physical address for the business it is run from various coastal locations. any ideas how i can still market for local search- maps etc. I have done the following optimisation: sitemaps title tag, description tag improved content removed duplicate content an blocker pages replace image text and replaced with header tag improved page names - making them static any advice of guidance would be greatly appreciated- will the fatc its built in wordpress limit its ability to gain better ranking in the SE? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
See your sites Architecture
Does anybody know a problem where you can see how your internal linkings look to the search engines?
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Are (ultra) flat site structures better for SEO?
Noticed that a high-profile site uses a very flat structure for there content. It essentially places most landing pages right under the root domain folder. So a more conventional site might use this structure: www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/ www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/landing-page-2/ www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/landing-page-2/landing-page-3/ This site in question - a successful one - would deploy the same content like this: www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/ www.widgets.com/landing-page-2/ www.widgets.com/landing-page-3/ So when you're clicking deeper into the nav. options the clicks always roll up to the "top level." Top level pages are given more weight by SEs but conventional directory structures are also beneficial seen as ideal. Why would a site take the plunge and organize content in this way? What was the clincher?
Technical SEO | | DisneyFamily1 -
Homepage display for seo
hi, Which is the best , seo speaking, about the homepage display with a CMS (joomla here). 1/ To display articles as "blog" and thus articles are always recent but not the same (chronological).. 2/ To display always a same article (just 1) but updated sometimes to times ? 3/ Both of them are good ? Tks a lot in advance..
Technical SEO | | mozllo0