Steady Traffic Decline over a 1 year period

[Gaura]

Hello everyone,

Need some help or suggestions.

We have been experiencing a steady decline in our traffic for the last year or so.  Beginning in October of 2011, we were averaging about 14,000 unique visitors per month (465/day).  We are now averaging about 8,000 unique visitors per month (254/day).

The thing that is really weird is that we do not have any type of a penalty from the big G.  We have just seen a constant decrease in hits over the last 12 month period.  Anywhere between 50-1,000 hits per month in decrease (continuously).  This has just been frustrating, and no matter what we do, we cannot turn it around.

Our whole website has been re-done in the last 3-4 months to see if we can stop this from continuing.  We re-did a lot of the content, got rid of some pages that had keyword stuffing, we're now working on removing bad backlinks pointing to us.

I am including an image with this post that will show you our gradual decline in traffic.  I understand that the Google updates and refreshers have been coming out quite frequently (Panda, Penguin).  But I also understand that most sites that have been affected by these algorithm changes, updates and refreshes have actually received penalties, sudden drops in traffic etc...  We are still working on fixing the whole site before we submit a re-inclusion document to the big G.

Does anybody in the SEOMOZ community have any suggestions or ideas as to what can be done to better our chances of getting back to normal traffic again?  Everything that we did prior to the 2 latest Google updates has been according to what was legal and what worked in the past.  Now, we have fixed the majority of those issues with our site, yet the decrease of traffic continues.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  I can provide you with our website URL if somebody would like to take a close look.

Thanks ahead,

Gaura

lCx44.jpg

[Gaura]

Thanks so much for your reply,

We did do some competitor analysis and duplicate content searching and couldn't find any major issues in this aspect.

You can also see in the image "http://i.imgur.com/lCx44.jpg" that we lost about 2,000 hits right about the time that the Panda and Penguin updates and refreshes came around.

As for Google Trends:

1.  Researched some of our major keywords.

2.  There was somewhat of a decline right around the year 2010.  The search volume has steadily declined since then.

3.  Important Fact:  Prior to the peak of search volume for our keywords before 2010 we used to average 16,000-1,7000 hits a month.  At this time the search volume for our targeted keywords was about the same as it is now.

4.  There is definitely something wrong here.

These are the company owner's thoughts on the matter:

"I think it has to do with sites linking to us that have been devalued and causing us to drop, the image shows a decent drop around the time of the G updates."

[IPROdigital]

Yep. You haven't mentioned competitor analysis or your URL which are the first things that come to mind. Feel free to add them Egol has given a great response

[EGOL]

We have just seen a constant decrease in hits over the last 12 month period.  Anywhere between 50-1,000 hits per month in decrease (continuously).

This does not seem to be a penalty or any action that google is taking against you.

What it looks like to me is a competitor eating your lunch.

A competitor in your space is promoting his site to improve its rankings and publishing new content that competes with yours.  The result is an increase in his traffic and rankings and a decrease in yours.

You diagnose this by knowing your competitors and watching for increases in content, links, pages or improved optimization.

The required response from you if you want to reverse this trend is a content development and site promotion effort that is superior to the competitor.

Other things could cause this.  Those might be...

• publication of duplicate content by you or by a competitor....

• a loss of traffic or power from links....

• thin content being devalued....

• decline in the number of people searching for your keywords

I would go out to the SERPs to see if my content is being duplicated... and determine if some of the things on my site were duplicates (either from other sites or having very similar pages on my own site).

The required response here is solving the duplicate problem by rewriting, deindexing or DMCA actions.

You can also look at google trends to see if there is a search volume decrease in your niche.