Traffic from organic grew significantly. But why?
-
Hello,
In our e-commerce business we saw significant growth in organic traffic during the summer months.
This is a period we sell a lot of custom made photobooks. The weird thing is that we didn't do any changes to our photobook pages since 2013, where we didn't have these peaks.
So this is good news, but...What would be a good way to start investigating the reason of this increase?
I have a hard time answering the 'why' question.Thank you very much for your help!
With kind regards,
Yannick
-
Hi Evelien,
Does organic traffic appear to be attributable to any particular country or countries? This may sound strange, but I wonder if a competitor pulled out of the market. It appears just about every competitor you have in google.be got a pretty nice organic increase around that time, which has continued. Kruidvat seems to have the lion's share now.
Last I knew, Luxembourg was something of a tax shelter. With the recent changes in VAT, I wonder if a significant competitor or competitors found it difficult to continue operations. But that's just a 'shot in the dark' on my part.
-
If you have Google Analytics (or similar) take a look at where the traffic is coming from and compare it to any historical data if you have it.
It could be something happened online like better rankings or a buzz about you on social media as Don said a link in a forum or it could be something offline like a newspaper or magazine article on you or even a mention on TV. Check referrers in Analytics.
If you have been at any trade shows that could also have driven traffic. Check 'city' report in Analytics.
If it's possible you may also be able to implement a 'where did you hear about us' question at some point - either when people come to buy something or as an after sales thing. That would help for future.
All good news for you though as you said but it's better to know why it happened so you can do more of it.
Hope that helps
-
Hi Yannick,
Sounds like you got mentioned on a few post. Perhaps a DIY blog or the like. These tend to drive traffic fairly well. Check your back link profile and see if you noticed any new sites popping up. A few months ago customer service said "what is up with all these new teflon o-rings sales lately", I did the research and it turns out we were mentioned on two forums with links to our teflon o-ring section.
Hope this helps,
Don
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
-
Huge Spike in Organic/Direct traffic from Mexico
So here's my situation: My company's website usually receives around 80 organic visits/month and 50 direct visits/month from Mexico. However, in July we saw a small uptick to around 170 for each and then in the last 7 days we are in the middle of a massive spike which has put us up to 1400 visits for organic and 820 visits for direct in August. The traffic spike continues as we are almost up to 500 visits just today! Things to know: The visitors are purchasing from our store, staying on our site, browsing around, basically acting like real traffic. I was unable to identify any new links, press, and we did not do any specific Mexico optimization (spanish keywords). We sell a ball and it is called The One World Futbol, but it's always been called a futbol before so nothing new here. our website is www.oneworldplayproject.com. Everyone coming organically is searching our name, not keywords. We updated our shopping cart a few days before the massive traffic spike and significantly lowered the cost to ship to Mexico. Our Latin America director went to Mexico to work there for a month a few days before the spike and sent out a bunch of emails, texts, phone calls, what's app notifications to his large network. From what I am told by others here he has a vast network throughout Mexico, Central America and South America. We have also seen large traffic increases in other Latin American countries during this same time period just nothing like Mexico. We just hired an awesome social media coordinator who is extremely focused and is implementing a kick-ass social strategy We launched a branding campaign called #MakeLifePlayFull with press releases and ad spend behind it. PHEW! That was a lot of info for you to digest. So on the surface this seems like great news. BUT I want to understand WHY this is happening. Could it really just be the combination of all these things listed above or is it just a combination of our connected guy being in Mexico with better shipping costs? Why is it mainly happening in Mexico? Why is it so sustained? I suspect that if it is from our guy it would drop off quickly. Any thoughts on what to look at? I'm stumped.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_OWPP0 -
Thousands of 503 errors in GSC for pages not important to organic search - Is this a problem?
Hi, folks A client of mine now has roughly 30 000 503-errors (found in the crawl error section of GSC). This is mostly pages with limited offers and deals. The 503 error seems to occur when the offers expire, and when the page is of no use anymore. These pages are not important for organic search, but gets traffic from direct and newsletters, mostly. My question:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
Does having a high number of 503 pages reported in GSC constitute a problem in terms of organic ranking for the domain and the category and product pages (the pages that I want to rank for organically)? If it does, what is the best course of action to mitigate the problem? Looking excitingly forward to your answers to this 🙂 Sigurd0 -
Traffic drop on this site
I am SEO'ing this site but need some assistance in the analysis. it was doing not too bad but in the last 4 months the google traffic has really fallen off, i suspect the keywords may need improving but any tips or observations would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crowng0 -
Traffic and keyword drop
Hello, On one of the sites that I manage - http://www.zalikihotel.gr/ , there was a significant decrease in keyword positions over the last 10-15 days. Sample screenshot is attached. Some of the keywords even dropped for 17-18 positions. From the end of April, organic traffic dropped by 30 percent. Website is mobile optimized, so that shouldn't be a problem. In the last 3-4 months, we had traffic increase. Domain authority went up by 3 points after the last index. On-site SEO was completed, and currently I'm focusing on link-building and working on bringing back to life forgotten social media. Does anybody knows what might be the case for this negative affects on our site? Do you think it's a temporary fluctuation or not? Thanks in advance. 8dSBELm.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | socrateskirtsios0 -
Unexplained Drop In Ranking and Traffic-HELP!
I operate a real estate web site in New York City (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). It was hit by Penguin in April 2012, with search volume falling from 6,800 per month in March 2012 to 3,300 by June 2012. After refreshing content and changing the theme, volume recovered to 4,300 per month in October 2013. There was a big improvement in early October 2013, perhaps tied to a Panda update. In November 2013 I hired an SEO company. They are reputable; on MOZ's recommended list. After following all their suggestions (searching and removing duplicate content, disavowing toxic links, improving the site structure to make it easier for Google to index listings, re-writing ten key landing pages, improving the design of the user interface) ranking and traffic started to decline in April of 2014 and crashed in June 2014 after an upgraded design with improved user interface was launched. Search volume is went from 4700 in March to around 3800 in June. However ranking on the keywords that generate conversions has really declined, and clicks from those terms are down at least 65%. My online business is severely compromised after I have spent almost double the anticipated budget to improve ranking and conversion. A few questions: 1. Could a drop in the number of domains lining to our site have led to this decline? About 30 domains that had toxic links to us agreed to remove them. We had another 70 domains disavowed in late April. We only have 78 domains pointing to our domain now, far less than before (see attached AHREFs image). It seems there is a correlation in the timeline between the number of domains pointing to us and ranking performance. The number of domains pointing to us has never been this low. Could this be causing the drop? My SEO firm believes that the quality of these links are very low and the fact that many are gone is in fact a plus. 2. The number of indexed pages has jumped to 851 from 675 in early June (see attached image from Google Webmaster tools), right after a site upgrade. The number of pages in the site map is around 650. Could the indexation of the extra 175 page somehow have diluted the quality of the site in Google's eyes? We have filed removal request for these pages in Mid June and again last week with Google but they still appear. In 2013 we also launched an upgrade and Google indexed an extra 500 pages (canonical tags were not set up correctly) and search volume and ranking collapsed. Oddly enough when the number of pages indexed by Google fell, ranking improved. I wonder if something similar has occurred. 3. May 2014 Panda update. Many of our URLs are product URLs of listings. They have less than 100 words. Could Google suddenly be penalizing us for that? It is very difficult to write descriptions of hundreds of words for products that change quickly. I would think the Google takes this into account. If someone could present some insight into this issue I would be very, very grateful. I have spent over $25,000 on SEO reports, wireframe design and coding and now find myself in a worse position than when I started. My SEO provider is now requesting that I purchase even more reports for several thousand dollars and I can't afford it, nor can I justify it after such poor results. I wish they would take it upon themselves to identify what went wrong. In any case, if anyone has any suggestions I would really appreciate it. I am very suspicious that this drop started in earnest at the time of link removal and the disavow and accelerated at the time of the launch of the upgrade. Thanks, Alan XjSCiIdAwWgU2ps e5DerSo tYqemUO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Why does the site I am working on have so few visits from organic search results?
Hello! I am not very experienced with SEO, but I am trying to help out on a site that has been around since 2010 and has well over a thousand pages of high-quality, original content, with more being added all the time. Only around 65 of the site's daily visits come from organic search results; this seems very low. There has already been significant SEO work done on the site. Is there something about the site that strikes anyone as obviously getting in the way of organic traffic? The URL is ellenjovin.com. I would appreciate any thoughts you may have. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyc-seo0 -
I need help with a local tax lawyer website that just doesn't get traffic
We've been doing a little bit of linkbuilding and content development for this site on and off for the last year or so: http://www.olsonirstaxattorney.com/ We're trying to rank her for "Denver tax attorney," but in all honesty we just don't have the budget to hit the first page for that term, so it doesn't surprise me that we're invisible. However, my problem is that the site gets almost NO traffic. There are days when Google doesn't send more than 2-3 visitors (yikes). Every site in our portfolio gets at least a few hundred visits a month, so I'm thinking that I'm missing something really obvious on this site. I would expect that we'd get some type of traffic considering the amount of content the site has, (about 100 pages of unique content, give or take) and some of the basic linkbuilding work we've done (we just got an infographic published to a few decent quality sites, including a nice placement on the lawyer.com blog). However, we're still getting almost no organic traffic from Google or Bing. Any ideas as to why? GWMT doesn't show a penalty, doesn't identify any site health issues, etc. Other notes: Unbeknownst to me, the client had cut and pasted IRS newsletters as blog posts. I found out about all this duplicate content last November, and we added "noindex" tags to all of those duplicated pages. The site has never been carefully maintained by the client. She's very busy, so adding content has never been a priority, and we don't have a lot of budget to justify blogging on a regular basis AND doing some of the linkbuilding work we've done (guest posts and infographic).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasonLancaster0 -
Should I 301 Poorly Worded URL's which are indexed and driving traffic
Hi, I'm working on our sites structure and SEO at present and wondering when the benefit I may get from a well written URL, i.e ourDomain / keyword or keyphrase .html would be preferable to the downturn in traffic i may witness by 301 redirecting an existing, not as well structured, but indexed URL. We have a number of odd looking URL's i.e ourDomain / ourDomain_keyword_92.html alongside some others that will have a keyword followed by 20 underscores in a long line... My concern is although i would like to have a keyword or key phrase sitting on its own in a well targeted URL string I don't want to mess to much with pages that are driving say 2% or 3% of our traffic just because my OCD has kicked in.... Some further advice on strategies i could utilise would be great. My current thinking is that if a page is performing well then i should leave the URL alone. Then if I'm not 100% happy with the keyword or phrase it is targeting I could build another page to handle the new keyword / phrase with the aim of that moving up the rankings and eventually taking over from where the other page left off. Any advice is much appreciated, Guy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guycampbell0