Big Drop in Traffic, No change in Position

[Laurensvda]

Penguin 2.0 was a great update for one of my biggest client. A website that was using terrible black hat techniques and ranked first on the most important keyword in my clients niche got kickt from the SERP's and my client jumped from 4th to 1st. The jump in traffic was enormous and on top of that 5% of the traffic converted instead of the usual 2,5%- 3% on other traffic.

Untill July 2nd. Traffic from the keyword dropped by 80% while we were still in position 1, after a lot of digging I thaught I found what caused it, Google booted the keyword from their autofill.

My question is if anyone has seen a removal from tthe autocomplete making that big of a difference in search volume.

[Laurensvda]

Hey Robert,

Thanks for your answer. I understand the confussion reading my question.

Yes my client is still in positon 1. It's pretty clear that the lower conversionrate an visits are due to the drop in traffic from that searchphrase.

The thing that I find most puzzling is that a keyword that had a volume of almost 50.000 per month in my country got completely removed from the autocomplete. It was a simple two word search term, the new preferred keyword in the autocomplete is the same except, for a space and the last letter.

[RobertFisher]

Laurens

I had to read this a couple of times to understand but there are a few questions: Still in position 1? Conversion rate sitewide dropped 4 % points... do you mean from 5% to 1% or do you mean from 5% to 4.8%?

For traffic from the keyword dropped 80% I would look at it like this: If the keyword was a phrase with two or more words: hot bananas tonight and that auto-complete no longer finished to be the full term I could see a lot of banana lovers just leaving tonight off, and subsequently you would see much of that traffic for the "newer" auto complete (hot bananas) IMO. But to drop 80% just because of this would be something to see.

As to your conversions dropping that is what makes the picture quite cloudy. You have to look at other/similar keywords and ask the same questions. If you see the same drop across the others I don't think you can say this caused it.

If total traffic dropped by 10% and the keyword was 80% then look at site traffic and this KW traffic prior over time. Get a median ratio of the two. So KW = 100 visits overall equal 1000 prior to change. Then KW = 20 and site = 900 after drop. For the keyword traffic that remained, is the conversion rate different? So, same keyword, different conversion?

Once you lay these out you will have more actionable data. I would look at visitor flow, etc. in analytics and slowly draw a picture of precisely what is happening. Don't look to prove it is the change in auto complete. Go see what is there, get the data down, then draw a conclusion. It may end up the same, but you will know you covered the bases.

I know this is not a perfect answer for you, but I hope it helps.

Best