Steady Traffic Decline over a 1 year period
-
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
-
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."
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
XML Sitemap Leads to loss in ranking and traffic in Google.
I have submitted XML sitemap in Google's webmaster tools for some of the categories of my website. after submitting the sitemap i have seen the drop in traffic and ranking of keywords for the categories tof which sitemap was submitted. The other categories for which i have not submitted the sitemap the ranks have not changed. my sites alexa rank is approx 3000 Please help me out should i remove the site or change the priority of the urls which i have fixed in the sitemap?
Industry News | | seosogo0 -
Difference between Organic and Natural Traffic?
This is a pretty basic question, but I'm wondering if there is any meaningful difference between the terms Organic and Natural traffic? My assumption is that Organic traffic refers to traffic that comes in through search engines, whereas Natural traffic would also include people directly entering a URL, coming in through social referrals, and through links on other sites in addition to organic search. Is this correct, or are there other definitions for what these terms mean?
Industry News | | ShawnHerrick0 -
How are Composite Door Shop number 1 for "composite doors"?!!
I have a client who competes with Composite Door Shop for "composite doors" and when doing a back link profile analysis it makes me wonder if Google is cramping down on EMD's (I know they have, I'm just frustrated!!) and how on earth they are number 1!! http://stereogum.com/49561/new_u2_video_get_on_your_boots/video/ and http://www.seo-writer.com/writers/index.php/2008/08/29/ghost-writers-need-to-eat-too/, both comments in blogs are their highest authority links!! Frustrating doesn't even cover it!! Is anyone else see that competitors have terrible back links?
Industry News | | KarlBantleman0 -
Indentify the reason for slow growth in traffic
Dear SEOMoz Team, We are leading B2B news portal in India. We have very slow growth in traffic what are possible causes and what are their solutions. Regards, Webmaster
Industry News | | anujsinghal0 -
What causes the reduction in traffic?
On FEB 2012 I got the now-famous notice from Google about the unnatural links. I contacted the SEO company who worked for my website and removed the inbound links. I submitted the reconsideration request and Google said that there are still unnatural links. I dig more on my links and continue to remove the links I think Google does not like. I again submitted the reconsideration request and they responded “we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.”. When I compared the non-paid traffic month by month, starting on March, I see these fluctuations: March compared with Feb -16% April compared with March -18% May compared with April +13% Jun compared with May -10% July compared with June +10% August compared with July -10% September compared with August -12% October compared with September-29% Also, If I look into the index stats on my WMT, I see that on October I have 50% less pages indexed compared with July. It has been dropping between 10% and 15% each week, as follows: | Date | Total indexed | Change 7/1/2012 | 1101 | -0.09% 7/8/2012 | 1020 | -0.07% 7/15/2012 | 1020 | 0% 7/22/2012 | 975 | -0.04% 7/29/2012 | 781 | -0.2% 8/5/2012 | 714 | -0.09% 8/12/2012 | 703 | -0.02% 8/19/2012 | 690 | -0.02% 8/26/2012 | 690 | 0% 9/2/2012 | 588 | -0.15% 9/9/2012 | 582 | -0.01% 9/16/2012 | 580 | 0% 9/23/2012 | 580 | 0% 9/30/2012 | 580 | 0% 10/7/2012 | 622 | 0.07% 10/14/2012 | 618 | -0.01% 10/21/2012 | 618 | 0% 10/28/2012 | 562 | -0.09% | The rankings for the 3 top keywords went (starting on April) From 5 to 15 From 8 to 27 From 5 to 39 At this point, I am not sure what causes the reduction in traffic.
Industry News | | cardif0 -
25% Drop in Traffic In Last Month - Suggestions as to why?
We have had a 25% drop in traffic in the last month and I am trying to establish why that is. Our serps on some key terms have also dropped. Has Google run any updates in the last month or so? Thanks
Industry News | | simplesimonseo0 -
Anyone have experience with the eTail Conference (upcoming 2/27-3/1/12)?
I just got a brochure with a very impressive lineup for the upcoming eTail conference. Has anyone here been to the eTail Conference? What's been your experience?
Industry News | | NaHoku0 -
I'm looking for solid internet usage / traffic data.
Hi there, In a week or two I'll give my first internet marketing presentation to a local business club. Ill walk them through the basics of what is happening online, and how both B2B and B2C business can use their online assets as marketing tools. I want some basic statistical data to back up my story, like: Current web usage distribution (social/search/media etc) Growth of Mobile vs Desktop Search Engines distribution (google bing yahoo msn) Online retail numbers To top it all off, I would also like to be able to show both worldwide and The Netherlands data. What is my best bet for some serious datamining ;)? Thanks in advance for helping me out!
Industry News | | rickdronkers0