After Ranking Drop Continue SEO or Focus on Improving User Experience Instead?
-
Six months after starting a marketing campaign and spending a lot of money on SEO audits, link removals, wire frames, copywriting and coding my web site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) traffic dropped significantly after I launched a new version of my site in early June. Traffic is down about 27%, but most of the traffic from competitive terms is gone and the number of leads (phone calls, form completions) is off by about 70%.
On june 6th an upgraded version of the site with mostly cosmetic changes (narrower header without social media buttons, streamlined conversion forms, new right rail was launched. No URLs were changed, and the text remained mostly the same. But somehow my developers botched up either canonical tags or Robot Text and 175 URLs with very little/no content were indexed by Google. At that point my ranking and traffic. A few days ago a request to remove those pages was made via Google WebmasterTools and now the number of pages indexed is down to 675 rather than the incorrect 850 from before. But ranking, traffic and lead generation have not yet recovered. After spending almost $25,000 over nine months this is rather frustrating.
I might add the site has very few links from incoming domains and those links are not high quality. An SEO audit was performed in February and in April a link removal campaign occurred with about 30 domains agreeing to remove links and a disavow file being submitted for another 70-80 domains that would not agree to remove links.
My SEO believes that we should focus on improving visitor engagement rather that on more esoteric SEO like trying to build incoming links. They think that improving useability will improve conversions and would generate results faster than traditional SEO. Also, they think that improving click through rates, reducing bounce rates will improve ranking by signaling to Google that the site is providing value to visitors.
Does this sound like a reasonable approach? On one hand I don't see how my site with a MOZ domain authority could possibly compete against sites with a high number of quality incoming links and that maybe building a better link profile would yield faster results. On the other hand, it seems logical that Google would reward a site that creates a better user experience.
Any thoughts from the MOZ community???? Does it sound like the recent loss of traffic is due to the indexing of the 175 pages? If so, when should my traffic and ranking return?
Incidentally, these are the steps taken since last November to improve SEO:
-
SEO Traffic & Ranking Drop Analysis and Recommendations (included in-depth SEO technical audit and recommendations).
-
Unnatural Link Removal Program
-
Content Optimization (Audit & Strategy with 20 page keyword matrix)
-
CORE (also provided wireframe for /visitor-details pages at no-charge)
-
SEO Copywriting for 10 pages
-
New wire frames implemented on site on June 6th
-
Jump in indexed pages by 175 on June 10th. Google Webmaster Tools removal request made for those low quality pages on June 23rd.
Thanks, Alan
-
-
Hi Alan,
First, a few things to consider:
- Did your site actually get hit with a penalty? You talk about removing unnatural links. Was that just to be safe, or something else?
- If your 1st site revision changed site urls and generated a lot of 404s, without proper redirection, you'd get the exact result you're describing.
- Did you get new copy written for your 1st site revision? If so, and you didn't write it, take a few sentences from different pages and search for them, in quotes, on Google. Make sure they weren't plagiarized, because that would explain a drop in traffic, too.
All of that said, here's what I'd do:
-
**Definitely **work to improve engagement. Engagement is good for your business anyway, so even if it had zero effect on visits, you'd make existing visitors happier. And, Google at least rewards you because of the secondary effects of a great UX: More attention and citation, more positive reviews, fewer bounce backs, etc. And yes, there's some evidence Google rewards great UX, whether deliberately or as a side effect.
-
Look for lost links and repair them. Use OpenSiteExplorer and get the Top Pages report. Look for all pages that respond with a 404. Put those pages back (if you had that page before), build a page at that location (if you never had that page) or do a 301 redirect from the page URL to a 'real' page (the easiest fix).
-
Check site performance. Did site load speed take a huge hit with the new design?
-
Look at your log files. Go all the way back to before the 1st site relaunch. Compare Googlebot activity on your site from that period to now. What's changed? Is Googlebot getting trapped somewhere? Has crawl traffic dropped?
-
Finally, I wouldn't engage in old-fashioned link building. It's a terrible idea for a site with a low DA. If you want to acquire citations, you're going to have to do it by making customers really happy, offering great information and content, and generally offering a great experience.
I hope this helps. There's no easy answer here. You're going to need to take a very strategic approach, rather than focus on a single tactic, if you're going to make this work.
Ian
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
-
Preserving rankings after migration
I have acquired new a client who wants to migrate to a new platform. He also wants a 100% guarantee we maintain he Google search rankings. How realistic is this? Anyone got a checklist they can recommend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Site hacked and now being spammed and rankings dropping
I have a client's site that was hacked in December and a whole bunch of spam pages were created. We've since removed those pages and they serve a 404 error now. But I pick up a new link almost every day from a another spammy site linking back to the pages that were created. I'm updating the Disavow as I see the new links reported in ahrefs but what else can I do to stop these buggers and how can I recover rankings other than building links and creating content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Onsite SEO vs Offsite SEO
Hey I know the importance of both onsite & offsite, primarily with regard to outreach/content/social. One thing I am trying to determine at the moment, is how much do I invest in offsite. My current focus is to improve our onpage content on product pages, which is taking some time as we have a small team. But I also know our backlinks need to improve. I'm just struggling on where to spend my time. Finish the onsite stuff by section first, or try to do a bit of both onsite/offsite at the same time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Website not ranking
Firstly, apologies for the long winded question. I'm 'newish' to SEO We have a website built on Magento , www.excelclothing.com We have been online for 5 years and had reasonable success. Having used a few SEO companies in the past we found ourselves under a 'partial manual penalty' early last year. By July we were out of penalty. We have been gradually working our way through getting rid of 'spammy' links. Currently the website ranks for a handful of non competitive keywords looking at the domain on SEM RUSH. This has dropped drastically over the last 2 years. Our organic traffic over the last 2-3 years has seen no 'falling off a cliff' and has maintained a similar pattern. I've been told so many lies by SEO companies trying to get into my wallet I'm not sure who to believe. We have started to add content onto all our Category pages to make more unique although most of our Meta Descriptions are a 'boiler plate' template. I'm wondering.... Am I still suffering from Penquin ? Am I trapped by Panda and if so how can I know that? Do I need more links removed? How can I start to rank for more keywords I have a competitor online with the same DA, PA and virtually same number of links but they rank for 3500 keywords in the top 20. Would welcome any feedback. Many Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wgilliland1 -
Ranking way worse than competitor even with better SEO metrics
Hello Moz Helpsters! I write you since I feel I'm missing something BIG and I'm sure that with all your experience you can find easily what's wrong. Here is my situation: We rank pretty bad on several KW and our competitor does well. BUT:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marc_steen
- our pages are graded higher
- our pages load faster
- our pages have more more links
- our pages have more popularity I feel there is something BIG I'm missing but I can't get to it. Can you have a look and see if you find any BIG issue we could have missed? Here are two pages for a good comparison. Both are ranking on "medecin generaliste paris" (translation: "general practitioner paris"):
- our page ranking #90: https://www.keldoc.com/medecin-generaliste/paris
- our competitor ranking #11: https://www.doctolib.fr/medecin-generaliste/paris Any help on this is veeeeryyy welcome 🙂0 -
Dramatic Ranking Changes
Hi, My website is ranked on the 2nd page of Google for the /ncr. Last week suddenly it climbed up to the first page and I let my boss know about it with a quite enthusiasm and happiness 🙂 Then my boss didn't look at it on that day and next day our site was on the second page again and still is. Now I kind of lost reputation in the office, and people start questioning my comments. It wasn't a delusion but I would like to know what it was. No one does any SEO for this 10 years old site, and I've just started an SEO campaign about 1,5 months ago. And I really thought this is it, we are on the first page. But now we are back in to the 2nd page. Is waiting for couple days or weeks to Google to settle right approach for such cases? Or it was just a random bounce or coincidence? Never seen such thing, so I'm quite curious about your opinions or experience if you have.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nunobaronio0 -
Best way to improve page rank
I notice many small business sites seems to have a page rank of 3,4, or 5 which don't appear to be doing a great deal of SEO on their websites. i.e these are very basic sites with a little static content that rarely changes, no blogs or particular links. Does having a high page rank still mean your will achieve better search engine positions? whats the best way to improve page rank for small business sites? thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Sudden drop in ranks and traffic after migrating community website into main domain
Hi, We recently moved our community website (around 50K web pages) to our main domain. It now resides as a sub-domain on our main website. e.g. Before - we had www.mainwebsite.com and www.communitywebsite.com After - we have www.communitywebsite.mainwebsite.com This change took place on July 19th. After a week, we saw 16% drop in organic traffic to mainwebsite.com. Our ranks on most of the head keywords including brand keywords have dropped. We had created 301 redirects from pages on www.communitywebsite.com before this change was made. Has anybody seen this kind of impact when domains are merged? Should we expect that within 3-4 weeks Google will be able to re-index and re-rank all the pages? Is there anything else we could do to rectify the situation? Any feedback/suggestions are welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amjath0