Improved keyword ranking but less traffic
-
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!
-
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!
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
-
Dark Traffic Mystery!
Hey everyone, My team and I have been digging into this problem and can't find an answer - and it turns out this has been an issue for over year. I'll try to explain the best I can, but let me know if you have any questions. My predecessor noticed a non-existent page URL getting traffic in GA. He had the web dev team create a page so he could see where the traffic is coming from. The page has every directive under the sun on it; noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir, noimageindex, notranslate All of the traffic is (direct) / (none). It gets about 300 visits per day. Avg. time on page is 15:40, bounce rate is 99.6% and it doesn't show up in the funnel. Previous page path is 92% entrance; 8% homepage. Geo is 92% US; then diversified across countries. Browser is predominately Chrome. OS is only Windows, and device is only desktop. I've run this page through a backlink checker, and we get nothing. I've run it through Screaming Frog and it has no internal links pointing to it. I've tried putting quotes around the URL and googling it and we get a few websites, but they're very low authority and it isn't likely that they're sending 300+ visits per day. Also, since all of the traffic is direct, I don't think it's coming from a backlink anyway. This has become a personal quest for several of us, as we really want to figure out where that traffic is coming from. Any thoughts? What am I missing? It's kind of driving me crazy because I can't figure out what I've missed, so if anyone figures this out and is coming to Pubcon in November, I'll buy you a beer!! 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | rachelmeyer0 -
When I click on organic search, the biggest drop is on keyword "not provided". What does this mean?
I am trying to identify the reason for the drop in organic search.
Reporting & Analytics | | Sable_Group0 -
Community Discussion - Do you think increasing word count helps content rank better?
In the online marketing community, there is a widespread belief that long-form content ranks better. In today's YouMoz post, Ryan Purthill shares how his research indicated 1,125 to be a magic number of sorts: The closer a post got to this word count, the better it ranked. Diminishing returns, however, were seen once a post exceeded 1,125 words. Does this jibe with your own data and experiences? Do you think increasing word count helps content rank better in general? What about for specific industries and types of content? Let's discuss!
Reporting & Analytics | | Christy-Correll6 -
Google Analytics - Organic Search Traffic & Queries -What caused the huge difference?
Our website traffic dropped a little bit during the last month, but it's getting better now, almost the same with previous period. But our conversion rate dropped by 50% for the last three weeks. What could cause this huge drop in conversion rate? In Google Analytics, I compared the Organic Search Traffic with previous period, the result is similar. But the Search Engine Optimization ->Queries shows that the clicks for last month is almost zero. What could be the cause of this huge differnce? e9sJNwD.png k4M8Fa5.png
Reporting & Analytics | | joony0 -
Self-Reffering Traffic After upgrading to Universal Analytics
Backstory: We have always had an issue with self-referring traffic but in waiting for the UA upgrade we put it on the backburner for getting fixed. We have now upgraded to UA and I was under the impression that GA would automatically exclude the domain associated with a property as a referral source. However this is not what I am seeing under my referral traffic source. With 10 websites having issues with this I need some help. Should I use the referral exclusion list? Also on a handful of our sites we have region specific URLs, I am also seeing these come in as self-referring traffic. I should also mention that about 85% of our sales are being attributed to the self-referring traffic. Here are two sites for example sake: ZootSports.com and K2snowboarding.com
Reporting & Analytics | | K2_Sports0 -
If i was to drastically improve 5 critical things on my site, what would you suggest?
I have put in a lot of improvements on my site both onsite and offsite, I was just wondering from a critical point of view, what 5 things would you suggest would require an improvement, that will consequently lead to both, a better user experience and better Rankings on Google? Open even to criticism 🙂 Thank You..... Find my site here:http://bit.ly/1vW4GGP
Reporting & Analytics | | ConnectMedia0 -
Use Google Spreadsheet for Top Keywords Report
I've been using the super-awesome Google doc described here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/custom-reporting-using-google-analytics-and-google-docs for all kinds of reporting and I've customized it quite a bit. But I can't figure out how to feed text-based fields from GA into this doc. For example, can I make it so this doc spits out top 10 keywords? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Oxfam_America0 -
Bing Vs Yahoo Rankings
I was under the impression that Bing powers yahoo search. However, I am recieving a large difference in ranking on some keywords in the two engines. Can anyone ask what or why this is happening? Thanks, Brandon
Reporting & Analytics | | GCSMasone0