Dramatic decline in traffic with same unchanged rankings
-
Hello
I would be grateful for any input on this.
I'm the webmaster of the site..
Before May 22, 2013, penguin 2 updates, i was getting around 700 - 800 Unique hits per day
After pengin 2 Updates, There is no difference In ranking... But my traffic has halved
Saturday for example the only received 66 hits.
Please check my ranking stats
Total Keywords
300 Rankings 220 In Top 3 288 On First Page
6. But traffic stats is
Week ending: 6/16 Change 6/23 6/16 Change 6/23 6/16 Change 6/23
Organic Search Visits
Total number of organic (unpaid) visits to your site from search engines.
1,782 -11% 1,589 37 -16% 31 1,745 -11% 1,558
URLs Receiving Entrances Via Search
The number of distinct URLs on your site that receive one or more organic (unpaid) visits from a search engine.
370 -4% 354 8 13% 9 362 -5% 345
Non-Paid Keywords Sending Search Visits
The number of distinct keywords that send one or more organic (unpaid) visits to your site.
886 -2% 865 8 0% 8 878 -2% 857My questions are
1. Why is there a major decline in traffic when ranking is more orless same
2. What is the possible solution?
3. Am I targeting wrong keywords? If so, what would the alternatives be? Please note the 300 I have inserted were simply cut and pasted from a list of 1103 targeted kws.
I would be grateful for any suggestions, so I may get traffic back to where it was before.
Thanks
-
Francis,
I'd guess that you've changed or removed the analytics script from some pages. Had you done any work on the site during that time?
-
I'd agree with Matt, it has to be other keywords that you are not tracking that must be struggling. What about seasonality? When you compare year-on-year, is the decline the same or out of sequence?
-
I think in order to give a conclusive answer one would have to delve deeply into your Google Analytics data. I would guess that if your main keyword rankings haven't changed they should still bring in roughly the same amount of visitors (give or take a few). The issue might be on the wider picture - longtail visitors, less important keywords etc...
If you log into Google Analytics and look at your main keyword, check its visitors over time - what do you see? Has that declined? Or has that remained stagnant? If it is stagnant then the issue is not with your main keywords but more a case of how wide you are spreading your net.
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
-
Interested ranking results
Hello, I have different pages that are written on the same model. I updated their content 2 weeks ago. Some of those climbed to 1 st page or beginning or 2 nd some didn't move or stayed where they originally were, 3 rd of 4 th page ? My question is whether there is a longer delay for some of them to rank (due to the term being more competitive for example) or if I should look somewhere else in maybe something that I wrote in the content of the pages that ranked versus those than didn't move. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Homepage not ranking for main keyword, all other pages ranking slightly for their own keyword phrases.
Dear Mozzers, We have an ecommerce website (www.pashmina-boutique.com), we want to rank the homepage for the keyword "pashmina". Problem is, we are nowhere to be found, not even in the top 100 search results of Google. It is indexed, we have no crawl errors, except that we had some problems with our hosting (503's), the crawler of Google bumped in a few of those. And we are fixing it. Our other pages, e.g. (http://www.pashmina-boutique.com/15-white-pashminas) ranks for "white pashminas" 24th and "white cashmere pashminas" 23rd. We have done no linkbuilding, in Majestic, you can check that. We have been offline for a long time (over 6 months) and about 3 weeks ago, we did a redesign (SEO). We relaunched, everything is looking fine except the homepage isn't ranking for the main keyword. Could you guys check it out? Is it over-optimization? It can't be Penguin, Panda would be a surprise too. Or do we still have to wait for the monthly Panda data-refresh? We are currently busy with this issue, once this is solved - that the homepage is ranking - we will start linkbuilding. Mr.1000
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mr.10000 -
Website losing rank positions after https
Hi there.. we were having a good increase in rankings since using Moz and then we purchased an ssl certificate so our website would run under https... to make sure our website is only accessed through https, we have used a method on .htaccess (appache) to make sure the website is only reached through https, using: RewriteEngine on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mszeer
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R,QSA] after doing this, from our last crawl perspective, we lost several positions that we were increasing.. what have we done wrong ? we have to fix this asap, please help us...0 -
Why is my ranking not improving???
Our site is about 4 months old now, although the domain is older. We are adding fresh new content, building good facebook/twitter/Goolge+ and undertaking good PR - but our ranking does not seem to be improving at all. Have I missed something obvious???? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
Search traffic decline after redesign and new URL
Howdy Mozzers I’ve been a Moz fan since 2005, and been doing SEO since. This is my first major question to the community! I just started working for a new company in-house, and we’ve uncovered a serious problem. This is a bit of a long one, so I’m hoping you’ll stick it out with me! ***Since the images aren't working, here's a link to the google doc with images. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I-iLDjBXI4d59Kl3uRMwLvpihWWKF3bQFTTNRb1R3ZM/edit?usp=sharing Background The site has gone through a few changes in the past few years. Drupal 5 and 6 hosted at bcbusinessonline.ca and now on Drupal 7 hosted at bcbusiness.ca. The redesigned responsive design site launched on January 9th, 2013. This includes changing the structure of the URL’s, such as categories, tags, and articles. We submitted a change of address through GWT shortly after the change. Problem Organic site traffic is down 50% over the last three months. Below, Google analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools shows the decline. *They used the same UA number for Google analytics, so that’s why the data is continuous
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Canada_wide_mediaOrganic traffic to the site. January 2011 - Dips in January are because of the business crowd on holidays.
Google Webmaster Tools data exported for bcbusiness.ca starting as far back as I could get. Redirects During the switch, the site went from bcbusinessonline.ca to bcbusiness.ca. They were implemented as 302’s on January 9th, 2013 to test, then on January 15th, they were all made 301’s. Here is how they were set up: Original: http://www.bcbusinessonline.ca/bcb/bc-blogs/conference/2010/10/07/11-phrases-never-use-your-resume --301-- http://www.bcbusiness.ca/bcb/bc-blogs/conference/2010/10/07/11-phrases-never-use-your-resume --301-- http://www.bcbusiness.ca/careers/11-phrases-never-to-use-on-your-resume Canonical issue On bcbusiness.ca, there are article pages (example) that are paginated. All of the page 2 to page N were set to the first page of the article. We addressed this issue by removing the canonical tag completely from the site on April 16th, 2013. Then, by walking through the Ayima Pagination Guide we decided for immediate and least work choice was to noindex, follow all the pages that simply list articles (example). Google Algorithm Changes (Penguin or Panda) According to SEOmoz Google Algorithm Changes there is no releases that could have impacted our site at the February 20th ballpark. However - Sitemap We have a sitemap submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, and currently have 4,229 pages indexed of 4,312 submitted. But there are a few pages we looked at that there is an inconsistency between what GWT is reporting and what a “site:” search reports. Why would the submit to index button be showing, if it’s in the index?
That page is in the sitemap. Updated: 2012-11-28T22:08Z Change Frequency: Yearly Priority: 0.5
*GWT Index Stats from bcbusiness.ca What we looked at so far The redirects are all currently 301’s GWT is reporting good DNS, Server Connectivity, and Robots.txt Fetch We don’t have noindex or nofollow on pages where we haven’t intended them to be. Robots.txt isn’t blocking GoogleBot, or any pages we want to rank. We have added nofollow to all ‘Promoted Content’ or paid advertising / advertorials We had TextLinkAds on our site at one point but I removed them once I satarted working here (April 1). Sitemaps were linking to the old URL, but now updated (April)
1 -
Rankings improvement strategy
I am working on my SEO strategies and though it would be good to get advice from awesome members: Our current rankings are on (Google United States) page 5. Our keywords have high competition and hence we need to follow tight plan. I want to learn some best strategies to get Page 1 rankings and how much time would be required approximately. (though I know its weird to ask for time in SEO but what I mean is some case studies or examples of how long you waited when you have pushed your website from page 5 to page 1) What rank maintenance strategies you follow in general. Does anyone have used any agency for rank maintenance for their niche.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EG0CENTRIX0 -
Google Page Rank Dead?
Does PR still work? I have sites that have PR3 and get almost no traffic and sites that are PR1 and get thousands of uniques per month. My PR on my main sites haven't moved for about 7 years, even though we've grown significantly. I know lots of you are going to jump in with get the MOZ toolbar, which I already have done, and I agree, it's great ... But can anyone tell me about what's going on with Google PR? Is it still active? Or has Google abandoned? I noticed that the Google toolbar is not even available for Google Chrome. That should say something ... If you like this question, do me a favor, and give me a THUMBS UP!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | applesofgold2 -
Traffic from twitter
Regarding traffic from twitter, I want to track this url - http://www.ultraseo.com/white-hat-vs-black-hat/ and generated the following URL using URL builder - http://www.ultraseo.com/white-hat-vs-black-hat/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social%2Bmedium&utm_campaign=seo Should i now pass it through a URL shortener bitLy or googles own. and tweet it. Is this what i should do ? Please reply ... where will i get a report in GA ( under which heading ? )
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050
