Rephrasing my question: I have no search traffic -- I would love some feedback
-
I just posted a question:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/am-i-on-the-right-track-still-not-seeing-results-in-rank-traffic-etc
An it already has 63 views and one response, but I think I may have phrased the question wrong.
I would love a little feedback on my site - I have zero search traffic -- none. I find that odd. I am not sure if it "just takes time" and I need to be patient, or if I am doing something really obviously wrong.
I have been really amazed by what I have read so far in this community, and have learned a ton. In my previous question, I listed all the things I am doing -- and I think I have the basics down pat.
Should I not have at least 1 visitor per day?
Any feedback would be appreciated.
Thank you so much!!
-
You are showing up in the SERPs. The number of visitors that you get will be determined by your position and how well your title tag elicits clicks.
Your site would not be a good one to offer "free beer" in the title tags but if you can discover words and phrases that elicit clicks then your traffic will go up.
Also, as your site becomes better know you will have likes and links pointing towards it and people will start asking for it by name. As these things occur your rankings will rise.
I write an article and a couple months later it appears on the second page... but a couple years later it can be #1 or #2. If you can produce content that is "Best-On-The-Web" in your niche it generally rises to a nice position.
-
It is just so odd, isn't it? Since I set up get clicky, I have had 9 visitors, 2 of them me : )
9 total -- that's direct, referral and search combined. And I am showing up in the SERPs, so, though I am sure the site isn't perfectly optimized, it does show up.
And it is not a spam site -- maybe it could be (a lot) better, but it certainly isn't horrid content
So, though I could see moving to WP, it still wouldn't theoretically fix the problem, would it? I am showing up in SERPs, but no one is clicking -- do I understand that correctly?
And if that is true, why the heck not, I wonder?
I really appreciate all this help, by the way -- I love that what you said about betting on yourself. I do think that is part of the equation.
Thank you very much!!
-
WP vs traditional site?
Both are good. Both perform well in the search engines - if they are set-up properly.
Most of my sites have been built with Dreamweaver and server-side includes that are controlled by perl programs. Most of these sites also have a blog that is powered by wordpress. I use wordpress because it is quick and easy to make short posts.
I use Dreamweaver because I make a lot of different page formats and I like to have complete control over it. I like to build finely-craft arrows rather than cookie cutter pages.
how is it that I am not seeing all my traffic?
I don't know. Are you seeing any Google visits from GetClicky? I am betting that you will see visitors coming from many sources - so you know that I am not the one you are seeing.
-
I just clicked "Good Answer" -- all your answers were awesome -- THANK YOU --
Do you mind -- last question -- why would it make a difference WP vs traditional site?
Just before I make the plunge and move everything -- would I see different results, do you think, and if so, why??
OH, heck -- i have to ask -- how is it that I am not seeing all my traffic? How is this even possible? The getclicky, too,. shows that I am not getting very much traffic -- there were a couple search visits, probably you : ) -- how is that possible, and would that change with a WP site??
Thank you!!
-
You are going to make an enormous investment of time into this site. Don't be afraid to invest in it.
The biggest mistake that I have made is not betting on myself sooner.
-
1) Yes, I did a few logical searches and saw your site in the SERPs several times.
- You are working really hard on this site. That time is worth an awful lot. You can probably get a smart someone to set-up a wordpress site for you, duplicating your "look", moving the content, and applying quality SEO for... I am guessing a few hundred dollars. The key is not getting the wrong person.
You could probably set up your own wordpress site. Lots of people do it. When I need a wordpress site or a blog I don't set it up myself. I get an expert so I know that its done properly.
- If you hire an experienced person to set up a wordpress site for you they will probably know a good place - where they are very familiar with the system. My sites are at a host where outside software, including wordpress, can be very hard to set-up. I think that they make it that way to avoid problems.
-
Do you mind if I ask a couple really dumb follow up questions? (I hope not...)
1. When you say you are absolutely confident that I am getting search traffic, do you mean people are coming but I just can't "see" them?
2. I love Wordpress and love your solution, and have considered it. I have played around with Wordpress for a few years and particularly am fond of pagelines. I have very very little money. I cannot really afford to hire someone...is it possible to do on one's own? What are your reasons for suggesting i hire someone -- based on what you have seen, do you feel I have a huge learning curve? (I hope that comes out correctly -- I am just asking for more information, since I have very little money -- if it is possible to do on my own, I will -- if not, I am not sure what my "plan B" is...
3. Do you recommend anywhere in particular for hosting???
THANK YOU!!! : ) I have installed clicky and do not see much traffic...but I do love this service -- that alone is enough -- thank you so much!!
-
in one week, it shows that those links have gotten close to 1,000 views.
So analytics, I assume, is properly installed.
I am absolutely, 100% confident that you are getting search traffic.
The following is just what I would do... this isn't "advice"... just saying what I would do...
I don't know the history of your site, how much you have invested there, how hard it would be to move and what can be done about redirects, etc.
But, most likely,
I would find a quality host and and install wordpress.
I would use "pages" for my website and "posts" for my blog. The blog would be on my primary domain.
I would use hosting that does not offer "unlimited bandwidth"... because those that offer unlimited bandwidth usually throttle your success by limiting your processing, database connections or some other metric that is invisible to most webmasters. (Most people never notice a problem but if you get up to several thousand visitors per day the throttling usually begins. I want a host who will charge me for everything that I use because that way they will want me to be extremely successful.)
If I was really serious about this site I would get a person who is experienced in SEO and wordpress to set it up for me. That way it would be done properly and that person's experience would save me a lot of experimentation and possible mistakes.
After that I would attack with a steady stream of great content.
-
Thanks! I have noticed your answers many times in this community and they are always spot on (IMHO)Thank you for taking the time to answer!
Yes, I have no search traffic...When I visit (I have several ips blocked, but the current one is not blocked) it shows my search visits -- I know b/c I have so little traffic that it is obvious that it is me. The only search traffic is a certain ip in my town, on a Mac, who used the keywords "i school at home" yep, that'd be me : ) So analytics, I assume, is properly installed.
I just started an adwords campaign to see what would happen..so that is something -- I will try getclicky -- I had never heard of it! Thank you!!!
I know. I currently have my site hosted by SBI, which frustrates the heck out of me. My blog I threw up on Blue Host and it is a subdomain of care2read.com
Does that make a difference? Is it important enough to change?
Also:
I just started affiliate marketing -- Lumosity is the one I am starting with -- and, in one week, it shows that those links have gotten close to 1,000 views. So that is odd...
-
Are you sure you have NO search traffic? I see your site in the SERPs.
What analytics are you using? If you don't have any then toss Getclicky.com or something easy on for a day and watch the real time data.
Also, you seem to be putting a lot of work into a blog that is on a different domain.
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
-
Google is a definition engine / Question answering engine
But what do you do to rank when you sell a product and people don't have questions and none of the companies that rank on your keywords answers questions... Let me give you a few example. Title tag for example : People want to know what is it and then have question about it What is the maximum number of characters ? How do you write a good one ? Etc... How to remove stains is another example : Please want to know how to remove all the different types of stains, (ketchup, grease etc..) But what about when you are a online business and want to sell usb keys , rent bicycles https://www.spinlister.com or even sell a software to do A/B testing on your website https://bit.ly/2a6cBuF Can someone explain me how those people mentioned rank without giving definition or answering questions... because according to me they don't do any of that on the pages that I mentioned. I look forward to your reply. Thank you,
Web Design | | seoanalytics0 -
Self-Generated Backlinks Question
I'm kinda new to the whole backlinks thing. My company does website design and we have, historically, included a statement in the Footer of the websites stating "Website by Our Company" linking back to our own website. Should we be NoFollowing these links? Are they hurting us in any way? Are there any best practices for this?
Web Design | | roger2051 -
Any second opinions as to why our organic search website traffic hasn't recovered from website rebrand (domain change, website redesign)?
I am hoping to see if anyone in the Moz community would be able to help troubleshoot or lend any advice on a major organic search traffic issue we've been experiencing over the last 8 months. In a nutshell, we decided our ~4.5-year-old business needed to undergo a rebrand in October 2015. After changing domains & redesigning our website (more below), our search-driven sessions have dropped 20% in 2016 v.s. 2015. We made quite a few on-site modifications (with some success) post-redesign but are still deep in a rut and not sure what more we can do to recover. I've listed my theories below as to why we're still suffering this hit. If anyone could weigh in on these and/or share any other troubleshooting ideas, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it (and owe you a lunch/beverage of your choice the next time I'm in your city!). ****Backlinks - despite our efforts to 301 all links, I sense we have lost many backlinks. According to Open Site Explorer, our old domain has 1,172 backlinks (some from some very authoritative pages domains), 1,068 of which are passing link equity. In contrast, our new domain has 367 backlinks, 321 are passing link equity, and very few overlap with our old domain. Domain Age - we may have lost much of our reputation with Google as our new domain is much younger than our old domain (1-year-old v.s. 5.5 years old). Domain Name - although I thought to have common keywords in one's domain was a myth, I am now questioning that belief. Our old domain contained a popular, topical keyword and our new domain is derived from a term that is topical, but very uncommon. New URLs - our developer has insisted all links were moved to the new domain, but I have a hunch they were not. When conducting a "site search" (i.e. "site:websitename.com"), the new domain returns 7,740 results. Prior to our switch, a site search with the old domain yielded 30,000+ results. 404s - we found and fixed 100-200 404'd links after the domain switch. We still see a few pop-up today and I'm wondering if this is a red flag in Google's eyes. For a little more background too, here are the nitty gritty details with a rough timeline: Pre-October 12, 2015 - registered new domain and designed the new website on Wordpress, while researching a range of articles and resources for a successful site migration (e.g. this and this Moz guide). October 12, 2015 - flipped the switch on the website design, domain, minor content reorganization, and social handles. We announced the change to our audience via an article, newsletter, and social; informed Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) of the new address, 301'd all links from the old to the new domain, and submitted new sitemap in GWT. October 12 - 16, 2015 - traffic is normal, everything seems to be okay. October 17, 2015 - search traffic drops by 54% v.s. the same day of week pre-rebrand. October 26, 2015 - search traffic rises, so now only down by 30% v.s. the same day of week pre-rebrand. November/December 2015 - re-added numerous elements from the old website such as category, tag, and page pagination and a few sidebar modules that linked to other important pages and tags. Search traffic rises slightly in November (down 27% year-on-year), dips again in December (down 31% year-on-year). January 2016 - today (June 17, 2016) - we published more content on a daily basis and search traffic fluctuates around the 20% versus the same period in 2015. January 2016 - down 23% year-on-year February 2016 - down 17% year-on-year March 2016 - down 20% year-on-year April 2016 - down 21% year-on-year May 2016 - down 21% year-on-year June 2016 (until the 17th) - down 23% year-on-year Thank you all in advance for your time and help, please let me know if you have any questions!
Web Design | | nick490 -
My news site not showing in "In the news" list on Google Web Search
I got a news website (www.tapscape.com) which is 6 years old and has been on Google News since 2012. However, whenever I publish a news article, it never shows up "In the news" list on Google Web Search. I have already added the schema.org/NewsArticle on the website and have checked it if it's working or not on Google structured data testing tool. I see everything shows on on the structured data testing tool. The site already has a news sitemap (http://www.tapscape.com/news-sitemap.xml) and has been added to Google webmaster tools. News articles show perfectly fine in the News tab, but why isn't the articles being shown on "In the news" list on the Google web search? My site has a strong backlink background already, so I don't think I need to work on the backlinks. Please let me know what I'm doing wrong, and how can I get it to the news articles on "In the news" list. Below is a screenshot that I have attached to this question to help you understand what I mean to say. 1qoArRs
Web Design | | hakhan2010 -
Traffic Dropping To Website
Hi In Google Analytics:
Web Design | | SEOguy1
I have noticed up to 50% of traffic coming to the website drops off at the home page point,
and drops further from other pages on the site. I realise some may possibly say that this could be down to various factors such as server issues, poor web design, or the wrong traffic reaching the site I have did corrected the following: There was an issue with there being www.domain.com and www.domain.com/home, Screaming Frog and Moz showed that these both had duplicate meta tagging issues. Initially I had created a separate page called 'home' to include in the main nav bar under the slider, but yesterday I replaced this page with a request in the functions.php to place 'home' in the nav bar as a redirect back to the home www.domain.com page. This works great. So I now have the following 301 permanent redirects: non-www to www resolve in the htaccess file, plus 2 permanent 301 redirects in the nav bar. I wonder if this is acceptable protocol re the nav bar redirects, and I wonder if you could possibly advise if the actions that I have taken will have any negative impact on the web seo, link structure, crawlability or indexing. Thanks.0 -
New Website launch, asking for feedback
Hey Guys, I just launched my new website. I just asking around for feedback. Please check it out if you have time and let me know www.benjaminmarc.com
Web Design | | benjaminmarcinc1 -
Why aren't Images in G+ product page posts showing up in SERPs for brand searches?
Before 1-2 weeks ago, our G+ posts containing links to our product pages would show up in in SERPs (when searching for our brand name) with a thumbnail of the product image. Now, they do not (see image below for visual). Our tech team confirmed there hasn't been any coding change that might be to blame and I see that this isn't happening to other sites. Any idea what may be the problem here? tcnhLgy
Web Design | | znotes0 -
Keywords in url - specific case question
There are a bunch of questions about keywords in the url and so far what I've gathered is that it's good to have them but keep it simple so it doesn't look stuffed. I'm working on redesigning some sites that were originally setup by a group who had no understanding of SEO (or perhaps I should say a misunderstanding) and spent a lot of time stuffing keywords EVERYWHERE. In some cases they weren't too far off but in others I think they just went overboard. One of the areas I'm trying to fix are the paths which leads to the following concerns. One of the sites has a basketball section and through the use of the Adwords keyword tool they determined that most people are searching for "basketball hoops". My first question is, how reliable are the monthly search numbers in the Adwords keyword tool? Are they accurate enough to warrant forming keyword strategies based on the results? As it relates to the url issue, the current tree for the basketball section of the site looks like this: /basketball (the landing page for the whole section, there are other sport specific pages as well) /basketball/hoops (goes nowhere. not sure why they didn't just go to /basketball-hoops/x for other pages) /basketball/hoops/72in-backboards (the systems are split into three different backboard sizes, these pages group them onto one overview page per size) /basketball/hoops/72in-backboards/specific-basketball-goal (the actual basketball goal details page with options to buy and such) So what I'm wondering about this setup is: does having /basketball/hoops take care of having the "basketball hoops" search term or would it be more effective to switch to /basketball-hoops? If it's fine to leave it at /basketball/hoops, do you think it would be beneficial to create an actual page for that path? We found that actually more people search for "basketball basket" than "basketball hoops" so maybe that would be a good page to try to make use of that term and explain maybe why people think "basket" instead of "hoop" and why we call ours "goals" or something. I tend to navigate pages by deleting path arguments and I hate when I land on a nonexistent path so I'm leaning toward changing the paths but just don't know if it's worth it at this point. Additionally, on one of the other sites, we have a domain that is the main keyword we want to rank for: swingsets.com The other company I mentioned then decided to put all of the product pages under: swingsets.com/swing-sets/{category}/{set-height}-{'swing-set'|'playset'|'swingsets'|'play-set'|etc...}/combo{#} So that comes out to look something like this: swingsets.com/swing-sets/outback/5ft-playsets/combo2 I've never liked that path setup. It looks stuffed to me, especially once they start using '5ft-swing-sets' and '6ft-play-set' on other product pages. It's inconsistent which is another issue I have since I tend to surf by path. Another issue with that setup is the final argument of combo{#} but there's nothing I can really do about that because they call the products out as combinations. The only actual product name is the "outback" part. I've been trying to come up with a better path setup for a long time now but again I'm concerned that I may just be wasting my time. The only thing I did do was make the height section consistently {height}-playsets. Is that good enough or should these paths remove /swing-sets from the beginning? The actual /swing-sets page is a good and valuable landing page but then I'm not sure if it remains valuable to keep it in the paths for the product pages afterward. Any insight into this dilemma would be appreciated. I've been stewing over this for a long time and my reasoning always becomes circular since I can see plenty of reasons for keeping them the way they are and simplifying them.
Web Design | | EscaladeSports0