Organic Traffic: Hockey-stick growth followed by slow rampdown of death!
-
My site, Site Builder Report, was started last year.
Months 1 - 6 saw modest organic traffic growth.
Months 6 - 9 saw explosive organic traffic growth.
Months 9 - 12 have seen a steady decrease in organic traffic.(I've attached a graph for visualizing this)
The site has not changed much over this time. In fact, in the last 3 months, I've done two things to try to get organic traffic trending upwards again:
- Increased the amount of long-form articles on the site (from 1 new article every 3 weeks to 1 new article every week)
- Fixed approxately 150 five hunded (500) errors in Google Webmaster Tools three weeks ago (converted them to 404s)
Neither fix has really been able to change the trend (although perhaps it's too early to tell with the fixing of errors).
Does this downtrend warrant concern? It's having significant business effects- would hiring an SEO consultant be the next step for reversing this trend? Any thoughts?
-
... killing me Steven ; )
It is really tough to say; however, I typed "website builder reviews" into Google Trends and it looks like there was a drop in searches for that terminology in March, which would correspond to what I am seeing on your graph.
Mike
-
I thought your graph displayed traffic and not rankings, how are you SERPs did they drop? Or are you still ranking in the same position for your keywords?
Because if the rankings are the same, it could be (I know generally this gets sorted out within first few months) but could be the issue of google still trying to figure out where to rank you: http://www.linkbuildr.com/reasons-why-new-pages-rank-well-then-drop/
-
Hi Vladim! I'm not sure I know what you mean- I attached a graph that might help visualize how the rankings have changed over time
-
Thanks Mike, sorry the post may be a bit unclear. I meant "Hockey Stick" as a metaphor.
The website actually targets keywords such as "website builders", "website builder reviews"
-
Hi Steven,
How are your rankings have they changed?
-
Hi Steven,
My guess would be you are seeing the downtrend, because of the season.
Here is the data I pulled from Google Trends for "hockey stick" - as you can see, the peaks tend to be in December and January for the year.
My guess things will be slow until next year when the season picks back up.
Hope this helps.
Mike
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
-
50% Visibility drop following June 2021 Google Update
Hello everyone,
Algorithm Updates | | yacpro13
We've observed a 50% drop in our Visibility score in the last week. This is our biggest drop ever, which coincides with June Google updates. We're an established ecommerce website located in Canada. This has obviously severely impacted sales. I'm frantically searching for information regarding fixes / implementations to recover asap, but if anybody could point us in the right direction, that would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!0 -
How to check which site performing well in google organic?
Hi All, Is it possible to check sites via any tool which sites performing good in google organic? Any site ... Is it possible via Alexa? My Concern is majorly for UK Ecommerce site... Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | pragnesh96390 -
Will increased pagerank increase traffic from google?
I got notified that my domain went from a google pagerank of 3 to 4. When this happens, does google raise me in the searches which can then hopefully get me more traffic, or is it a worthless number. Maybe only google knows 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | BrickPicker0 -
Organic Traffic Stagnant
Our automobile portal is the leading in Pakistan and we are there for almost 10 years now, we already rank in top 3 keywords ( top 1 on most of them ) but our search traffic has become stagnant, we have tried to optimize for keywords that google search tool show has more traffic and we have gained ranking in most of them but still our search traffic isnt showing any much increase. Is it possible that we have already got all the juice and there arent much people who are searching auto related keywords or what can we do to increase organic traffic? Work on long tail keywords? Whats next?
Algorithm Updates | | razasaeed0 -
Traffic drop :(
Hello MOzzers, hope you are all well. Here is my question. Site : http://www.gunshotdigital.com Issue: Traffic In the past 3 days we have close to 300 Unique visitors, but today we just have 5. Totally confused as to why this might be. I know Matt Cutts hinted at algo change in 2 months. Our rankings are still steady. So could anyone help? 🙂 Thank you Mozzers, we love you and are flattered to be part of this formidable community. Vijay
Algorithm Updates | | vijayvasu0 -
Bing Traffic drop
Anyone notice a drop in Bing traffic on January 26th? Slashed by 50% and holding for the past three weeks. 100% white hat site
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
Tuesday July 12th = We suddenly lost all our top Google rankings. Traffic cut in half. Ideas?
The attached screenshot shows all. Panda update hit us hard = we lost half our traffic. Three months later, Panda tweak gave us traffic back. Now, this past Tuesday we lost half our traffic again and ALL our top ranking Keywords/phrases on Google (all other search engines keywords holding rank fine). Did they tweak their algorithm again? What are we doing wrong?? eartheasy.com wtf.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | aran0880 -
Organic CTR on Google - KPI?
Hi, I was hoping for some advice on my keyword analysis I have completed. So far I have identified a hitlist of high volume keyword associated to the industry I operate in. As well as this, I'm monitoring our keyword positions within the SERPS. Question: Is there a CTR metric available depending on the position your keyword ranks within Google? i.e. If I am position 3 and looking to move to position 1 on a specific keyword, what amount of incremental search volume would be geneerated to my website? PResumably the CTR would also depend on what market you operate in too I am also going on a 65% / 35% Organic/PPC split based on keyword search volume so to give me a true reflection of the search volume available... Any advice on this would be much appreciated... Simon
Algorithm Updates | | simonsw0