How to recover my traffic? How to make a boring subject interesting?
-
Hi all, your feedback would be hugely appreciated.
I've had a mortgage website for about a year and half now that I've painstakingly filled with relevant, informative content. I've seen my traffic ranking in Alexa go from > 14,000,000 a year ago to right around 1,000,000 today, but I got hit really hard in the recent Google updates.
I lost about 60% of my traffic at the end of April and have been at a loss as to what to do about it. I wasn't doing anything shady to generate traffic, so my guess is that some of my backlinks were discounted in the update, so my site got hit in the rankings.
Now I'm really trying to rework my site to get my traffic back. What would you suggest? I feel almost like I'm starting at square one again because all my efforts thus far got hammered in the updates.
Currently I'm updating and reworking some of my content to format it better, make the site more navigable, and better optimize the content for the search engines. I've also hired a virtual assistant to manage my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts to help build traffic that way. I'm keeping up with blogging on a regular basis as well, but it's such a big time suck when I'm trying to get loans funded full time as well.
Also, mortgages is kind of a boring subject. Who the heck would want to come back to my site every day and read about mortgages? How can I make the subject interesting and fun so that people want to come back on regular basis?
I'm new here and your thoughts are most welcome! Feel free to unleash the tough criticisms too! My site is mortgagesbymark.com if you'd like to take a look at it.
Thanks!
-
Great comment, thank you Keri! The subject of mortgages is not the most fascinating to most people, but hopefully I can at least keep it as interesting as possible while still providing great info. Thanks!
-
I'd like to address the "boring" comment. I'm in the middle of buying a house right now. I don't need a mortgage site to be cute or have fuzzy animals or be funny. I want the information to be clear and understandable. I want to know if I should care about which title company I select, or if I should just go with the default title company that my real estate agent selects.
I'm looking for useful information that is well-written, has a lot of content, links out to the appropriate government sites where I can go for the full legalese, and will help me at two in the morning when I can't sleep and am wondering something and I can't call up the loan agent or I want a second opinion.
I may not come back in six months after I have my house and my loan is all settled. But if I remember your site as being a great site where I could get the information I need, I'll recommend it to someone who is talking about buying a house and needing a mortgage.
-
Yes it was scary. I went from over 5k a month in adsense to 2k. But work hard on establishing rep with other and links just come to you
-
Thanks Cesar, I'll definitely check into that. Sounds like you got back on your feet quickly - right on!
-
Great comments, thank you! I recently just happened to start reworking some pages with conversion in mind, so it's good to reminded of the importance of that.
-
Without going to your site simply taking a look at your back link data at http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.mortgagesbymark.com%2F you might being having a SERP issue. You have links from your own site but many of your one way links from other sites are low in DA and PA. Getting quality sites backlinking to your page is where you will see a major increase.
I too suffered a lose from Panda and recent Google updates. I lost about 75% of my traffic. Even though I had a quality site my rankings tanked. In reasearching my backlinks I noticed the DA and PA of most of them were pretty low. I then looked at my compettores and they were beating me in that area. Since then all I have done was work on establishing relationships with partnering sites, getting them to add links back to my site and just establish a rep with them. Since then I have almost completely recovered from the lose.
Back-links are key, don't do Black or Grey hat because that will bite you in the end. Work on quality links from other sites. Remember quality not quantity. I still catch myself optimizing my site for SEO rather than the user. Change your way of thinking and watch it work
-
Hey Mark; Content and traffic is a great thing but as a business owner I'm guessing the end result is to convert that traffic into a lead. How is your conversion? What would it be worth to you to increase that by 10-20 percent? Pictures can say a 1000 words, your site is very textual and informative but has little focus on visual queues for segmenting your audience and cleary providing your offering. What action do you want your audience to take? And how well do you present that in all your pages? Once I find your content, How do you take me from reading it to interacting with you? Unless you have that dialed in, spending your energy and money on attracting traffic will result in just that, traffic. My initial thought would be to enhance the home page and back pages with a conversion strategy, and once that is in place to continue your traffic efforts
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
-
Blog post generating irrelevant traffic. What should I do with it?
I have a blog post that has been generating more than 75% of my website's traffic month over month.-averaging about 1000 views a month. Awesome that so many people are finding and benefiting from this post, however it is really skewing my traffic. I have an 87% bounce rate, and I'm only ranking in terms related to this post as opposed to industry related terms. I'm not sure what to do with this blog post. I want to be able to better evaluate my website's performance and be sure I'm targeting the right audience in order to gain more leads. Would a 'noindex' or 'nofollow' be appropriate here? Thanks!
Content Development | | Ali_DeLeg0 -
Project content marketing SEO value and Traffic
I'm creating a content marketing plan and need to project the visitor impact it could have on an exact-keyword domain name. The plan will produce at least 10 quality, original articles per day. Are there any common metrics or ways to guess what the visitor impact could be?
Content Development | | msantore821 -
How to make a .dwt in html 5
I bought a new HTML 5 theme. My website is still in frontpage and now the SE penalties are killing my business I have lost over $150K in revenues since July compared to the previous year and am going insolvent if I don't get my rankings back. So I have redo my website this week. I have tried many times to do this with many platforms (drupal, C5, joomla & others) and my brain keeps getting stuck. I think I figured out why. I am used to frontpage and the .dwt which allows me to easily create new pages from the .dwt and I know enough about SEO to do the job but I can't get out of the gate with the new themes. The .dwt worked with my brain & I am lost without it. My questions are 1-Is there a web editor I can get for HTML5 that I can create a .dwt from? The site I got the theme from also sells them for dreamweaver & expression web but I am concerned if I use those I will find myself right back where I am now, w/ an unsupported platform. 2-The other thing I am stuck on is when I open the index.html file in an editor and try to modify a page to get started, I try to preview the page and I can't see the CSS. Is that normal? My concern is spending the massive amount of time to do the work and then finding it doesn't display properly. 3-I also need the ability to 301 redirect my old pages which I can't do with frontpage, I'm at the point where i must redo the site ASAP and upload it but I can't get it started. I must rename most of my pages for SEO reasons, i used short form page titles not long form when I did it years ago. For instance, the domain is cheaptubes.com and I have a page that is cheaptubes.com/swnts.htm when it should be cheaptubes.com/single-walled-carbon-nanotubes.htm for proper SEO. I need to redo the site, rename the pages, and then 301 to the new pages. I had my hosting co do a 301 years ago from my old domain cheaptubesinc.com to the new one cheaptubes.com but a moz member correctly showed me yesterday that the 301 is no longer there. (another reason to get to a platform where I can do the 301's myself). I am getting a duplicate content penalty as the SE's see both sites with the same content. I think all of these things add up to the total devastation I am seeing with my business and I will go under soon if I can't start ranking well again. If I can get the new site up & the 301's working then I will resubmit the site to the SE's 4- do I need to 301 the old site too?
Content Development | | cheaptubes0 -
Great content/news articles - but struggling to drive traffic from them
We publish 2-3 great quality news stories/posts on our sites weekly, but are struggling to gain traffic from external sources for them, other than our own blog and socials. We have followings for each of our sites, but want to expand and get our posts found in other relevant blogs, features, releases etc. The posts are 'Top 10 Tips...', 'How To... in 6 Easy Steps', 'What Makes a Great...' etc. All great things that people want to read about and share. All this of course helps towards the SEO of the sites, but the posts aren't written for that, they are written to guide and inform. My question is, how are other people getting their great content found online, talked about and shared? I personally think that our posts are awesome; containing useful information that will help people. Isn't that what it's all about?
Content Development | | bricktech0 -
Sell your writing or make your blog to publish it ?
Hii would like to know that should we sell our own written articles on freelancing site or any other sites. or we have to make our own blog and publish it on. Because I see most words that content quality is very important, So what do you think i sell the writing or publish it on my website. Actually i register a domain mbgadget and just want to know what should i do, i sell my writing or publish it on my blog what to do, I don't know if there is any other stratgy that you know, to make some bucks online in a same manner what to do, please explain it.
Content Development | | seom20140 -
Driving Website Traffic
How much does organic traffic make up of your overall traffic? I have typically been driving my traffic through social channels and trying to get a feeling for how much of my traffic I should expect through SEO over time. For my blog www.shoottokyo.com I promote it through Google+, Facebook, and Tweeter. I also 'distribute' it through Feedburner, Google Currents, Feedly and a Newsletter. There isn't one way to promote but rather target actions through multiple channels. Google+: 1,500,000+ have me in circles Facebook: 3,000+ friends, fans and followers Twitter: 2,700+ followers Feedburner: 2,300+ subscribers Google Currents: 36,000+ subscribers Feedly: 1,000+ subscribers My newsletter: 2,900 subscribers Each of these are good sources of traffic. Are there others you would recommend considering? How much guest posting do you typically do?
Content Development | | ShootTokyo0 -
How to make a bad posting drop down the search engines
we have had a competitor who has been stealing a lot of content from us and now they have used seo tactics to write a bad article about one of our sites that they have been taking content from, and what we would like to do is to use seo techniques to drop their article down the rankings. We are consulting a solicitor to take action against them as we are fed up of the content being stolen and the other techniques they are using, can anyone give me ideas on the best way to drop this post down the rankings. I was thinking about articles and press releases and blog posts to get higher up in the rankings and do a lot of these to drop their article down the rankings. Our solicitor has already taken action against them in the past and that cost us a fortune and it looks like we are going to have to spend a fortune again, so any help on using seo techniques to drop their article down the rankings would be great.
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How to make an article easy to read?
i want to ask technical pints of an article which can make that article easy to read and simple in language.
Content Development | | KLLC0