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
-
Will SEO Blogs Divert Traffic from Main Web pages using same keywords?
Our company has drafted several SEO blogs using certain keywords. If we post these SEO blogs to our website and social media channels , and the blog keywords are also used on our main website pages, will the blogs divert or dilute traffic to our main web pages? Thank you for your expertise and insights in advance.
Content Development | | Johnenchroma0 -
Lost almost all organic traffic. Need some help.
Hi Mozers. I blog about our son with Down syndrome (https://noahsdad.com) and you may remember me from this case study here on Moz. https://moz.com/blog/seventeen-ways-to-improve-your-blog-case-study I was getting close to 100,000k a month in organic traffic to our blog, then it slowly started to decline to the point where I am not only getting 3k in organic traffic a month. So basically I lost all of my traffic. I honestly have no idea what is going on or why this happened. I know everyone is busy but would anyone be up for taking a peak into my GA and search console and seeing if you can figure out what may have changed and why my traffic dropped off so much. Our website helps a lot of people so you'd be doing some good and it may even be a good case study post! Thanks so much!
Content Development | | NoahsDad0 -
Sudden drop in traffic in April and stagnant since then
Hi, I am the editor at a travel website based in Singapore (www.tripzilla.com). In mid April, we suffered a drop out of the blue and in total, it was a 20% drop overall. We post about 2-3 new articles a day, and we do research our keywords. I have also been updating our older ranking articles but seems like it's not really working. In May, we only received a .50% growth 😞 I have to bring it back to speed, and I really dont understand the decline, since the "formula" of our postings has been the same since I joined the company a year ago. Please help thank you! onjn7UV
Content Development | | mousepad881 -
Repurpose/reuse blog content - email address to make available for this
Hi, From Rand's recent Whiteboard Friday, I learned this: "Have right on the blog page the email address to use if they want to repurpose/reuse the content. That way if someone wants to give us a backlink and quote/reference our blog, they have an easy way to get permission." My question is, what do I say with the email address when I list our contact email? Something like 1. Just list the email address 2. "To reuse/repurpose our content, please contact adress@email.com." or something else?
Content Development | | BobGW0 -
Multiply pages of similair subject not showing up in serps?
Hi, I have a website with a lot of similair subjects. Its a website with around 1000s pages.
Content Development | | vulonl
For example this website is about "cars" so I wrote a pages about: Green classy cars
Green cars for the summer
Green car show 2013 What happens is that on the query of "Green car show". The page green classy cars shows up. I have the feeling that google takes one page about a similair subject and only put on in the serps. I checked this on multiply pages and this seems the case. If I search on exact "Green car show 2013" + MY URL, still then its shows indexed but only position 4. Places 1,2,3 shows again other pages of my website with similair subject. Now my feeling says the other pages have more authority and thats why they show up higher. But then...again now all the content Im adding it isnt showing up.. The last months I added around 300 pages and I did not got one visitor more daily and I have the feeling it is because it are all similair pages and google does not want to show them. My question is: Is their something I can still make them show up? Because they do have all 100% unique content and 100% unique images they only have similair subjects. or Is their some way I can tell Google that his are really different pages, so this would maybe help?0 -
Best way to publish FAQs to capture long tail traffic?
If you want to target long tail traffic from commonly asked questions what is the best way to publish answers to these questions? A really long FAQ page, a new page for each question in a /faq/ subfolder, adding them to relevant product pages that already exist? Is creating a new page for each question a problem because the answer might be a paragraph and Google doesn't like thin content?
Content Development | | ProjectLabs0 -
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 -
My Wordpress traffic has gone through the roof, huge referrals from wordpress.com - why?
My Wordpress traffic has hit an all time high over the last few days - in the last 48 hours I've had as many views as the last two months combined. This huge spike in traffic has coincided with a great piece of exclusive content that went up, but I wouldn't expect the traffic to be nearly as high as this. The strange thing is that all the extra traffic seems to be referred from Wordpress.com, however, I cannot drill down to a more specific URL. Also, the referrals do not seem to translate into page views of the homepage, nor a particular article. Can anyone offer any insight into this situation? Thanks
Content Development | | pugh0