SEO direction - help needed

[relientmark]

Hi,

I've been working on a site for about 5 years. We built the traffic up to about 8k visitors/day.

Although now it's dropped down over the past 2 years to about 2k visitors a day.

New traffic source is mainly from SEO longtail.

The whole time we have been working to improve the site.

What's the best way to get some help from experts on the right direction to get traffic back up or to at least tell me the site will never work

Thanks in advance.

M

[relientmark]

Thanks Matt, Joey, Joseph and Keszi for your feedback.

I will investigate and see what I can come up with.

I will update any progress.

Cheers

M

[Keszi]

Hi Mark,

The guys have mentioned quite good answers above, so I am not going to elaborate on that.

I just wanted to jump in with a tool for the algorithm diagnosis: http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

It helped me a lot to see which update has hit one of the sites I have been working on.

I hope it will help you as much, as did with me.

Gr., Keszi

[jlane9]

Good advice Matt,

Mark, look at your traffic over the time period i question. Then pull up Moz's list of algorithm updates ( http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change ) See if your substantial drop in traffic correlates to any of the updates to help determine if you got a specific penalty problem. This could be an eye opener to discover what could be a bigger potential problem than you initially thought or never knew about at all.

If the traffic drop was slowly over time, I would also check your keyword rankings over time. It may be as simple as more and more of your competitors are catching up on the seo work . Slowly out ranking you and getting a big share of your previous traffic.

I would definitely check the algorithms in relation to the traffic drops.

Hope that helps,

Joe

[gowebsol]

What was the quality of the traffic you used to have? Were you getting good conversion?

Matt's comments are great. I'd also add that with the info you shared (mainly the timing), your traffic was possibly from rankings propped up by bad links? I'd do a thorough link audit if you haven't already, and simultaneously start brainstorming some great user-focused content that targets those short tail keywords with volume. If you feel the need to hire an expert, the Moz Recommended list is a great place to go. http://moz.com/community/recommended

Whoa! When did that list get so big??

[MattAntonino]

Hey Mark,

It's hard to say with the info you've provided but were you hit with one of the many Google algorithm updates that tanked your traffic at once or did it slowly just go away?  What were you doing differently then?  I know a lot of small businesses that were blogging like mad for a long time then stopped and shockingly, traffic dropped as their content activities stopped. When they resumed, readership didn't immediately pick back up so they got frustrated & stopped again.  All that on again, off again, on again is definitely not going to help.

If you were affected with some sort of Google zoo animal, you'll probably want to get professional help getting it sorted. 6000 traffic lost is just SO much. If you need anything further, please do let me know!