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
-
Community Discussion - Are annotations an overlooked avenue for driving traffic from YouTube?
Happy Friday, Q&A friends! This week's discussion question comes from Amir Jaffari's YouMoz post from Thursday, January 28. Amir explains how he was able to use annotations to massively increase his YouTube videos' views without using ads, and raise his annotation CTR 22,400%. Have you tested annotations to see if they dramatically improve conversion rates? What were the results? What other strategies have you tried?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattRoney3 -
Onpage Reviews, SEO & Traffic Uplift
Hi I wondered if anyone knew of any case studies to reinforce the importance of on page reviews for SEO & increasing traffic. I'd like to push it in my company, however it would be great to show them some results from a case study. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
List of SEO "to do's" to increase organic rankings
We are looking for a complete list of all white hat SEO "to do's" that an SEO firm should do in order to help increase Google/Bing/Yahoo organic rankings. We would like to use this list to be sure that the SEO company/individual we choose uses all these white hat items as part of an overall SEO strategy to increase organic rankings. Can anyone please point me in the right direction as to where we can obtain this complete list? If this is not the best approach, please let me know what is, as I am not an SEO person. Thank you kindly in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RetractableAwnings.com0 -
How to measure traffic for a keyword
Sitting in Country A I want to see how much traffic a particular keyword receives in Country B. Whats the best way to do it? Also, will the search results differ if I am analyzing the above sitting in Country A viz-a-viz Country B. In other words, will the IP of the country I am making the search from play a role in the results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__0 -
What will happen if we 302 a page that is ranking #1 in google for a high traffic term?
We're planning to test something and we want to 302 a page to another page for a period of time. The question is, the original page is ranking #1 for a high traffic term. I want to know what will happen if we do this? Will we lose our rank? Will the traffic remain the same? Ultimately I do not want to lose traffic and I do not want to 301 until it has been properly tested.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maxcdn0 -
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 -
How to increase the traffic and keywords ranking
Am working on a website http://www.greavescotton.com. A month ago most of the keywords were in first page. This month I have noticed the fall of keyword rankings. I have checked the webmaster tools for any mails and messages but I did not find any. So can anyone please visit the site and check it and please give me the suggestions accordingly to increase the traffic and keywords. Also I would like to know the advantages of commenting in Youtube.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PrasanthMohanachandran0 -
Impact of SSL - switching from http: to https: on organic rankings?
Hello, just paranoid, but thought i'd ask. We are installing an SSL certificate on a site ranking very well organically in all the engines. This will change our site from http:// to https://. Is there an risk to our rankings in doing so? What might I need to consider? Changing my htaccess redirects to https: instead of http;? Any ripple effects from switching to a secure site? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seagreen
Greg0