Stopping slow steady decline
-
I work for an ecommerce company and I have been tasked with trying to understand our lack of organic traffic. For the past two years our organic traffic is in free fall. We have 80% drop in organic visits since summer 2011. I can't put my finger on what is causing it. Here are a few hypothesis I've tried.
Penalty - I don't think it is a penalty because we still have some first page results.
Penguin- I know in the past (10 years), we haven't used gray hat (paying for blogging) strategies. But I don't see a steep decline that would lead me to think its a penguin update.
Panda - For the past two years we have been re-writing content for our 10,000 products and creating videos. But even though our content is better than every, we haven't had any uptick in organic traffic.
Does anyone have any suggestions on where / how to investigate these issues further?
I've attached our organic traffic graph. October 2011 we launched a new site, saw a large dip in traffic. It slightly rebounded, and then has slowly suffocated ever since.
-
You should get an Advanced Google Analytics Consultant to figure out what is happening. I know if I were in this problem, I would be running a lot of Advanced Segments. Every business is different so there's no canned responses. Also the reason I say to hire someone for an analysis is if what you say is true and you don't believe the site has a penalty, then you can be losing traffic for many other reasons.
You need to find out "why" conversions are lower.
-
Did a new competitor enter your vertical? You usually don't see a slow death like that unless you are slowly losing your ranking to someone else. I'd look at your webmaster tools to see where you are ranking for specific keywords. It has it broken down by position in there, as well as just average ranking.
For example, every time I checked a specific phrase with a tool I ranked #1. Yet, I was only getting 10% of the traffic from that word. So, I dug deeper, and it turns out I was popping up #1 50% of the time, but the rest of the time I was somewhere in the top 5.
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
-
Can you help by advising how to stop a URL from referring to another URL on my website with a 404 errorplease?
How to stop a URL from referring to another URL on my site. I'm getting a 404 error on a referred URL which is (https://webwritinglab.com/know-exactly-what-your-ideal-clients-want-in-8-easy-steps/[null id=43484])referred from URL (https://webwritinglab.com/know-exactly-what-your-ideal-clients-want-in-8-easy-steps/) The referred URL is the URL page that I want and I do not need it redirecting to the other URL as that's presenting a 404 error. I have tried saving the permalink in WordPress and recreated the .htaccess file and the problem is still there. Can you advise how to fix this please? Is it a case of removing the redirect? Is this advisable and how do I do that please? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Nichole.wynter20200 -
Steady, but continous Google traffic drop. Help?
I am facing a steady, but deteriorating Google traffic drop and i am struggling to find the real reasons. The site is in the video entertainment niche. Here is some data regarding the site in general: Site redesign happened around June We are not doing a lot of off-site and link building in 2013, besides social activities and content distribution to partner sites (top links from OSE are gained long time ago) GWT crawls errors are clean (besides 404s) No manual actions from Google or penalty notifications Serious fluctuations in indexed content in June, but no real effect on traffic Removal of old content during August Top keywords are dropping (may be caused by category pages removal and flattening site structure) Robots file disallows only search-generated pages No sitemap errors or warnings 2K of duplicate meta-titles and descs Thank you and appreciate your help. wyOyoA9
Technical SEO | | dimicos1 -
Why did Google stop indexing my site?
Google used to crawl my site every few minutes. Suddenly it stopped and the last week it indexed 3 pages out of thousands. https://www.google.co.il/#q=site:www.yetzira.com&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:w&sa=X&ei=I9aTUfTTCaKN0wX5moCgAw&ved=0CBgQpwUoAw&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=cfac44f10e55f418&biw=1829&bih=938 What could cause this to happen and how can I solve this problem? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | JillB20130 -
How to stop my webmail pages not to be indexed on Google ??
when i did a search in google for Site:mywebsite.com , for a list of pages indexed. Surprisingly the following come up " Webmail - Login " Although this is associated with the domain , this is a completely different server , this the rackspace email server browser interface I am sure that there is nothing on the website that links or points to this.
Technical SEO | | UIPL
So why is Google indexing it ? & how do I get it out of there. I tried in webmaster tool but I could not , as it seems like a sub-domain. Any ideas ? Thanks Naresh Sadasivan0 -
Google ranking my site abroad, how to stop?
Hi Mozzers, I have a UK based ecommerce site, that sells only to the UK. Over the last month Google has started ranking my site on foreign flavours of Google, so I keep getting traffic coming to my site from Europe, America and the far east that we could never sell to, and as a result bounce is going up and engagement is going down. They are definitely coming to the site from google searches that relate to my product type, but in regions I do not service. Is there a way to stop google doing this? I have the target set to UK in WMT, but is there anything else I can do? I worried about my UK ranking being damaged by an increasing overall bounce rate. Thanks
Technical SEO | | FDFPres0 -
What can i do to stop my site from dropping in the rankings
Hi, we were number one in google for the keyword lifestyle magazine but now our magazine website www.in2town.co.uk is doing very bad in the rankings. One week ago we were around 8 then we went to 12 and now we are on the third page and i am not sure what is happening. We wanted and needed our home page to rank for the keywords of lifestyle magazine, lifestyle news but none of these keywords are doing very well with google can anyone please point me in the right direction so i can stop my site falling any further I am not sure if the home page is properly optimized but i have never had trouble with it before many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Sudden SERP stop for main keyword.
Hey guys, I have a website with about 30 Google indexed pages. Most of my pages are perfoming well for my keywords. My homepage recently started doing extremely well. Number 4 overall for a highly competitive keyword/niche. Then after a week it dropped completely off the map. It still shows for secondary and tertiary keywords. But my primary keyword does not rank anywhere. I checked as deep as 50 pages. It's been 3 weeks now. Any ideas of what might have happened? Is there really a sandbox? Could I maybe have been Panda slapped? Or do you think it is more likely just a technical/SEO issue. It just seems odd that it jumped so high and then disappeared??
Technical SEO | | VictorVC0 -
On a dedicated server with multiple IP addresses, how can one address group be slow/time out and all other IP addresses OK?
We utilize a dedicated server to host roughly 60 sites on. The server is with a company that utilizes a lady who drives race cars.... About 4 months ago we realized we had a group of sites down thanks to monitoring alerts and checked it out. All were on the same IP address and the sites on the other IP address were still up and functioning well. When we contacted the support at first we were stonewalled, but eventually they said there was a problem and it was resolved within about 2 hours. Up until recently we had no problems. As a part of our ongoing SEO we check page load speed for our clients. A few days ago a client who has their site hosted by the same company was running very slow (about 8 seconds to load without cache). We ran every check we could and could not find a reason on our end. The client called the host and were told they needed to be on some other type of server (with the host) at a fee increase of roughly $10 per month. Yesterday, we noticed one group of sites on our server was down and, again, it was one IP address with about 8 sites on it. On chat with support, they kept saying it was our ISP. (We speed tested on multiple computers and were 22MB down and 9MB up +/-2MB). We ran a trace on the IP address and it went through without a problem on three occassions over about ten minutes. After about 30 minutes the sites were back up. Here's the twist: we had a couple of people in the building who were on other ISP's try and the sites came up and loaded on their machines. Does anyone have any idea as to what the issue is?
Technical SEO | | RobertFisher0