Any ideas why organic traffic seems to have hit a plateau?
-
I run an eCommerce store and have a decent number of quality links pointing to it(which is still growing). It's been 6 months since I started it, and I'm getting between 100-120 organic visits per day right now. I've had a few more quality guest post/infographic links, and I'm also focusing on optimizing individual pages, but my traffic still seems to have plateaued.
I'm beginning to doubt that more links is the answer. All of my content is unique(no manufacturer descriptions) and I'm still being outranked by sites that have spammier link profiles and copy/paste descriptions.
Any thoughts?
-
I don't think you'll see any quick or significant impact linking from your long-tail ranking pages to your individual product (the beauty of the long tail is that you don't need to be so competitive in order to rank) so there's not so much
That's not to say that you shouldn't do it but think about what's best for the visitor.
Consider where the visitor is in the buying cycle and provide content that supports them at the stage/awareness they're at. Do they know what the solution to their problem or need is? Do they understand the benefits of your offerings. Why should they buy from you.
Make sure each of your pages offer an obvious next step. This can be finding out more about your products or is can be a link to buy a particular recommended product.
Don't forget your category pages either. Make sure they have some great unique content too - as well as making it easy for people to find what they're looking for.
Retargeting is a great idea from Christopher, but I'd also say remember the other downloadable assets like buyers guides case-studies, product data sheets (not just the manufacturers produced stuff) - make sure that any such assets are clearly branded, have your website address and active links back to your site.
Again, a lot depends on the kind of products you're selling.
-
You are most welcome my friend. Improving the stickiness, as you said is a bit hard but if we can make it happen, then nothing like it. Let me share a personal experience here. Few years back, I had a client with an e-commerce site. The avg. time spent on the site was around 1 min and few seconds (sorry do not remember exactly). He wanted to improve it. When I saw the product pages, for example, a page related to a coffee making machine, the page had nothing but only the product image, description, features and a button to place an order. We then took some good videos of the product from Youtube and embedded them on to the page. We also added some related products to the right hand side of the page. We did this to all the product pages of the site and the results were very dramatic. The avg. site engagement times jumped to over 3 mins. Then we also had few clients whom we got gamification implemented on the site, small flash games related to the niche and this also got them amazing results. Site engagement time as you know is very important and Google knows who is sticking around and who is leaving once they click through the search results pages and land on a site.
Coming to your blog, I really enjoyed reading it and I would continue visiting it.
Good luck to you my friend.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
-
About 90% of organic traffic is new visitors.
Are you using Retargeting? A significant fraction of the visitors to your site may be interested in a purchase but surfing is easily distracted. Retargeting can be a cost-effective way to get their attention again.
Best,
Christopher -
Hi Devanur,
Thank you for the encouraging words. Sticking out is actually the hardest part! You need to dig a little into your pockets to do that, so you can get impatient at times
PS - thanks for reading the blog and your kind words, it means a lot!
-
Hey Doug,
Thanks for such an in-depth answer. Its interesting that you mention the long tail - a lot of my existing traffic is coming from long tail keywords, but like you said, it's hard to convert those visitors.
One thing I can think of to improve the rankings of individual products is to try and funnel link juice from the high-ranking long tail pages to relevant product pages. Do you think that could help?
About 90% of organic traffic is new visitors.
-
Hi Shabbir
As you've encountered, as you rise up through the rankings it becomes harder and harder to displace those ahead of you.It's a bit like running a marathon starting at the back of the field. You can get to a point where no matter how hard you run, you're never going to catch the guys who started before you.
Ranking for product pages can be insanely tough - even with unique product descriptions...
Brute force link building can only take you so far and increasingly you've got to watch out that your backlink profile isn't going to come back to bite you.
Without knowing what niche you're in it's hard to provide specific advice, but here are some thoughts:
1. You're getting traffic, but how much of these are new visitors and how many are returning visitors? What can you do to get more of those visitors to engage and take action. How can you turn these visitors into loyal returning customers? This can be difficult if you're selling a commodity on price alone.
2. Go broad and think of your long-tail. Instead of focusing on the head-terms that become increasingly difficult to improve, think about growing your long tail by adding content to your site. This can for example, take the form of Frequently asked questions, how-to guides, tips etc or other more creative ideas. It's the richness and depth of thiscontent that'll earn you traffic from queries you would never target individually.
Just remember that these pages still have to work hard to move your visitors towards your site's goal and becoming customers.
Your long tail can deliver more traffic than your head-terms combined. The downside is that the commercial intent may not be as strong for some of this traffic so you'll need to work hard to convert this traffic into customers.
3. Instead of targeting those people who are looking for your products, write content for people who are trying to find answers to the problems that your products solve.
4. Guest blogging just for links doesn't really help you establish your site as an authority and you're missing a trick if your not getting your content in front of your potential customers. Where do your customers hang-out? Can you write guest articles that will attract traffic to your site rather than "just a link". You've got to understand what you're audience is interested in and resist the urge just to tell them what you want to tell them!
Hope this helps,
-
is this a local ecom site? You will definitely face local classified ads, spammy competitors etc and most of the time, they will outrank you. It's just the way local is for those outside the USA side.
The good thing is, most of these competitors just stop spamming and the real clients that eventually find you will be loyal to you. Just continue what you are doing, if possible build a social community as well. Try to get some more local coverage (if you are indeed targeting local) and look at your webmaster tools. See where you need to improve.
Finally, test a PPC campaign. You'll see a whole lot more data vs just waiting for WMT data. You can get ahead earlier and improve your converts.
Good luck Shabbir
-
Hi Shabbir,
Without digging deeper, I would like to say that your website is relatively new and please have a look at your competitors' websites and the time they have been online. You can use archive.org for the purpose. New websites can take time to gain the traction and 6 months is very little that too when you say, its an e-commerce website hence, cut throat competition. Its good that you have been getting 100 -120 organic visits per day. If you continue the way you have been doing, you should be in a good shape soon.
As you know, content that is unique, highly relevant, useful to the visitor and serves the purpose of their visit will do the magic for you. Please don't worry about websites that use low quality or scrapped content ranking at the top. Its not going to work for long (but can greatly depends on the kind of authority they have like DA and PA). In general, search engines have higher tolerance levels for highly authoritative websites.
I would like to conclude by saying, please do not worry as your website is very young and concentrate your efforts to improve the quality of your content, you can try to include some small videos and images (on the product pages) related to the products' functionality, features, USPs etc..improve the stickiness of your website (make your visitors hang out for reasonable amount of time on your site), earn links rather than building them desperately (I am sure, you will never do this as I read your blog). Try to build citations to your site from good websites and you know the rest.
All the best to you.
Devanur Rafi
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
-
Started linkbuilding, traffic drops
So I have a couple 3 year old projects I left intact for the last 2 years. Lately I tried to revigorate them. I started to build links to pages that used to be in Google top ten, but the more links I build, the more I lose out on traffic. The main keywords stay around the same position, I suppose the loss in appearances and traffic that can be seen in webmaster tools is mainly due to long tails I do not check the rankings for. I want to ask you guys if anybody have experienced similar data? I suppose it might be due to the exact anchor tags that I have used 3 years ago, so I already started removing those to see if it has a positive effect. I wanted to ask you, maybe somebody has experienced the same and already knows the reason and a solution for this phenomenon?
Link Building | | snetface0 -
30% loss organic clicks in last 30 days
Hey all, I am a bit stumped here so looking for some insight. Our site was starting to rank well for many keywords, and we were getting roughly 25k visitors organically per month. Now we are down 30% over the last thirty days, and I am trying to figure out why. This downtrend started I would say about mid August. 1. No messages in webmaster tools.
Link Building | | DemiGR
2. Our linking building is very good, no spammy links, never black hat. We did have someone attempt negative SEO on us back in July. We disavowed those links as soon as we saw them. Basically all our links come from link baiting to quality content. Many .edu links
3. Content is good and fresh, always adding new stuff to the site. When I look in webmaster tools and look at my search queries for last thirty days, our impressions are down dramatically, but the change in average position is increasing. Our top 25 keywords we saw 15 rise in average position, 5 fall, and 5 unchanged. This makes me think there is just a reduction in the amount of people searching for what we offer, though maybe that's wishful thinking? Is there a way to see search volume this month vs last month? What should I be looking at here? Hoping to stop this downward trend ASAP.1 -
Some ideas for promoting a brand new website
Hello guys, I`d like to ask you if you can give me some ideas on how to start promoting a brand new website and any good places where to get some backlinks Thanks
Link Building | | helpgoabroad0 -
Why do the best ranking websites not seem to follow SEO best practice, particularly in terms of link building?
I work for an online retailer, which predominantly sells perfume products. In recent months, we have been spending more and more time on SEO, particularly in terms of improving our content, and as part of our strategy we have been working with beauty bloggers in particular (independent reviews, articles etc) to increase the number of links to our website. Whilst we’ve seen steady improvements, we are concerned that some of the key words/phrases we are targeting still aren’t ranking as high as we would like. Some weeks they will move up a few places, but more often than not, they will then move back down. We are more frustrated as we are seeing other websites, which are much poorer in terms of quality content, number of products, etc., ranking quite highly for these terms. From analysing these sites, it seems they are achieving their high ranking from having a considerable number of what appear to be poor quality links. We have been warned countless times to avoid link farms, etc., yet these sites have 100s even 1000s of links coming from suspect sites and it isn’t doing them any harm. Recently, we noticed a lot of our competitors are receiving links from websites such as LinkPartners. When we checked the website, we could see that whilst it appears to be a fairly SPAMMY website, its domain authority (67) is actually quite high. Should we base our decision about whether or not to place a link somewhere solely on how high their domain authority is, i.e. would it be more beneficial to us to have a link with what appears to be a link farm if their domain authority is high, than what appears to be a fantastic independent beauty blog with a low domain authority? Or should we avoid these sites whatever the circumstances? It’s slightly confusing for us as we are being warned about placing links on websites as google is apparently going to penalise us for it, but then we see our rival sites doing well by simply placing links everywhere they can.
Link Building | | DazzaH1 -
How come www.ifundinternational.com beat us despite that most links seems VERY shady?
How can ifundinternational.com with TONS of spammy links rank 70 keywords in TOP20 in the competitive hard money lending industry? They seem to go AGAINS ALL WHITE HAT SEO and all rules by Panda, Penguing and Hummingbird. Just frustrating that they get away with it. What to do about it?
Link Building | | peterpumkineater0 -
Losing traffic - What are we doing wrong ?
Hi, my ecommerce site has been losing organic traffic/ranks for the past 12 months. I don't have any active seo campaigns. after using link detox tool and submitting a disavow file for low quality links to google about 8 months ago, site has picked up some traffic may be about 10% but after few months it started to lose traffic again. there is no manual penalty on site. I would appreciate any and all suggestions at this point to help gain some traffic/traction. Anything that would point us in the right direction would be very helpful. here is my url http://goo.gl/udynRR thank you nick
Link Building | | orion680 -
Is a lot of inbound traffic coming from site a problem for SEO?
We have a site which is going to deliver content to a big news site and in return we will receive a lot of traffic from the news site. Estimates are that it will be about 50% of our daily traffic. Before this we have about 2000 daily visits, where 50% is from organic traffic. How will this affect our rankings? (It should be pretty obvious to Google that an increase like that in reffered traffic is bought - which I assume will ahve a negative impact on our organic rankings) What is the best tactic to use - regarding SEO - if (when) we proceed to deliver content/recieve traffic from that news site? (we have a lot of decent rankings on several branch keywords, and we don't want to risk those rankings. On the other hand - if we could improve our rankings from this deal - we would like inputs to that as well? Best regards, Chris
Link Building | | sembseo0 -
Are Link Exchange A Bad Idea
Hi, i am wondering if link exchanges are a bad idea. I have seen a company called link market where you join and exchange links with other companies and i am just wondering if this is now a bad idea. The last thing i do not want to happen is for google to get angry if i done link exchanges
Link Building | | ClaireH-1848860