Improved keyword ranking but less traffic

[EconostoNL]

Hello fellow mozzers!

My collegue and I are a bit puzzled in regards to our recent website statistics. In november 2013, we upgraded the technological platform of our website to be fully HTML5 coded, and implemented the schema.org Products scheme to systematically tag all our products on the site. To prevent too much loss of visitors, we created a 301-redirect table from almost all our old URL's to the specific new ones, as we implemented a new URL structure as well.

The first few months were bumpy as expected, making a huge drop in rankings before rising up again. Our keyword rankings are better then ever (60% of the keywords in top 3, average competition, 25% more on first SERP) but our number of visits dropped by about 10%. Our bounce rate went down from 20% to 14%, our returning visits are stable, but our new visitors stats dropped by 25% as well. This comparison was made between equal periods in the current year and last year, using organic data stats. (new technical platform vs. the old one)

What could be the reason that our number of visits dropped 10% while our keyword ranking is better then ever? We don't have any manual penalties in GWT and can't understand why visits would drop so much while ranking improved. May it be so easy that there's just less search volume on our ranked content or does anyone have other ideas?

Thank you all in advance!

[ChadC]

I think that the bigger question you should be asking is.. "is our site making us more money now or not". With out a open door to your data I would guess that even though your rankings raised for your targeted keywords, you might have dropped in ranking for some less relevant keywords (Hints why your bounce rate improved). Has your conversion rate gone up? A lose in traffic is not always a bad thing, if you are losing irrelevant traffic. I would say that if your quality indicators have improved than I wouldn't be to concerned about the lose in traffic. I would just start focusing on how to move forward with identifying the next set of relevant keywords that you want to rank for. Hope this helps!