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
-
How to unrank your content by following expert advice [rant]
Hi, As you can probably see from the title, a massive rant is coming up. I must admit I no longer understand SEO and I just wanted to see if you have any ideas what might be wrong. So, I read this blog post on MOZ https://moz.com/blog/influence-googles-ranking-factor - where the chap is improving ranking of content that is already ranking reasonably well. I've got two bits of news for you. The good news is - yes, you can change your articles' ranking in an afternoon. Bad news - your articles drop out of Top 100. I'll give you a bit more details hoping you can spot what's wrong. Disclaimer - I'm not calling out BS, I'm sure the blogger is a genuine person and he's probably has had success implementing this. The site is in a narrow but popular ecommerce niche where the Top 20 results are taken by various retailers who have simply copy/pasted product descriptions from the manufacturer's websites. The link profile strength is varied and I'm not making this up. The Top 20 sites range from DA:4 to DA:56. When I saw this I said to myself, it should be fairly easy to rank because surely the backlinks ranking factor weight is not as heavy in this niche as it is in other niches. My site is DA:18 which is much better than DA:4. So, even if I make my pages tiny tiny bit better than this DA:4 site, I should outrank it, right? Well, I managed to outrank it with really crap content. So, I got to rank two high-traffic keywords in #8 or #9 with very little effort. And I wish I stayed there because what followed just completely ruined my rankings. I won't repeat what was written in the blog. If you're interested, go and read it, but I used it as a blueprint and bingo, indeed Google changed my ranking in just a couple of hours. Wait, I lost more than 90 positions!!!! I'm now outside Top100. Now even irrelevant sites in Chinese and Russian are in front of me. They don't even sell the products. No, they're even in different niches altogether but they still outrank me. I now know exactly what Alice in Wonderland felt like. I want out please!!!!
Algorithm Updates | | GiantsCauseway0 -
Relauch + traffic loss averages
How normal is it to have a bit of traffic loss for a relaunch? What percentage? For how long?
Algorithm Updates | | MichaelEka0 -
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 -
Google Sign-In increasing organic encryption keywords?
I am curious how brands that have implemented Google Sign in dealing with the organic encryption keywords. Have encrypted keywords increased after applying Google Sign-in?
Algorithm Updates | | LNEseo
How are you dealing with the missing keyword information?0 -
Unable to increase the site traffic since 2 yrs
Hello friends, I am new to seomoz forum and this is my first query. Even i asked this query in many forums, i didnt get the right answer. it will be a big help if anyone answers my question. Since 2yrs i am doing seo for my site. even i am following all the white hat techniques and doing every submission manually. Still my site traffic is below 100 visits. Can any one help me to increase the site traffic? What are the techniques i need to follow to increase site visits? Also one of my sites recently got disappeared from google. I have checked all the pages listed in google for my site's major keywords. I didnt find the site anywhere. Can u hep me why this condition wll happen and what to do to overcome such issues?
Algorithm Updates | | Covantech0 -
[G Penalty?] Significant Traffic Drop From All Sources
My client's traffic started to significantly decrease around Nov 21 (Panda update 22). This includes traffic from all sources - search engines (G, B, & Y!), direct, AND referral. At first we thought it was a G penalty but G answered our reconsideration request by stating that no manual penalty had occured. It could be algo penalty, but again, the site has been hit across all sources. Client has done zero backlinking - it is all natural. No Spam, etc.. All of his on-site SEO is perfect (700+ pages indexed, all unique content, unique title and desc). On Oct 16, he switched from his old URL to a new URL and did proper redirects. (Last year - Dec 2011 - he switched his CMS to Drupal and although there was a temporary decrease in traffic, it showed recovery within a month or so.) He does zero social on his site and he has many ads above the fold. Nevertheless, the traffic decrease is not source specific. In other words, all sources have decreased since Nov 21, 2012 and have not recovered. What is going on? What can be the explanation for decrease in traffic across all sources? This would be easy to answer if it was only Google Organic decrease but since direct and referral have also been hit, we cannot locate the problem. Please share your personal experiences as well as advice on where we should look. Could this be negative SEO? Where would we look? ANY ADVICE IS WELCOME !!!! Every bit counts Thanks!!
Algorithm Updates | | GreenPush0 -
Organic Rank Volitility
Does anyone else see their organic rankings fluctuating wildly. I have been tracking a few key keywords by literaly typing them in each morning and looking at results. The pages I have been doing this for where without any doubt affected by Penguin as you can see the huge drop in traffic directly correlated to the Pegnuin deployment. What is strange is one day these phrases will be on page one position 3 and two days later but on page3 to 5 or not ranked. Four days later back on page 1. These are wild fluctuations so it appears to me that I am observing Penguin tweaking ? Just wish the tweaking would stop on one of the days were our phases for this particular site are on page one. Most people would check rankings weekly, monthly or quarter and would not perhaps be observing these crazy swings? Thought?
Algorithm Updates | | freestone0 -
How to increase my traffic?
I've performed countless SEO tactics, post tons of unique content. social bookmark tons of it. Facebook, Twitter, etc. Implement new sections to my site all the time in the past month I've implemented a dating site and a discussion forum. Yet my traffic pretty much always stays the same. We are at a level where our site is now the best place on the web to find disability news, and I can't really think of how else to improve it without simply having it more active. Is my niche just too small? http://ablemagazine.co.uk
Algorithm Updates | | craven220