SEO traffic to the homepage is down across sites
-
Week over week, I've noticed that organic traffic (and oftentimes revenue) for the homepage are down across most of our sites compared to last year. Brand search interest is down for a number of the brands, but in a lot of these cases, it's not down so much that it would make sense for how much the homepage is down (for example: brand search interest was down 4% last week compared to last year, but the homepage traffic was down 32% in visits).
What I've done is generate entry page reports (this year vs. last year) and then bucket the pages by homepage, category pages, and product pages. In most cases, category pages are up year over year for traffic and revenue. I'm concerned that the homepage being down is more than a brand heat issue, but I haven't come across anything out of the ordinary in Google Search Console and keywords are pretty consistent in performance for the most part. Branded keywords continue to rank at #1, too.
Any thoughts as to what else I can look into?
-
Hey WWW SEO,
It seems to me that the pages' implementations seem correct, so it doesn't appear to be a tracking-based issue.
Have you taken to top terms that are driving traffic to these pages (Google Search Console or internal data if you have it) and plotted them in Google Trends to see how they compare over the past 24 months or so? Some may not be high-enough volume, but those that are should give you a feel for where the the volume stands in YoY comparison.
Regards,
Trenton -
Hi Trenton -
Sure. Here are the 2 that I'm most waiting to anniversary the platform launch for: http://bit.ly/1XgbhtZ and http://bit.ly/1Xvikzl.
I've also seen http://bit.ly/1XvivuF take a hit in homepage traffic (mobile traffic to the homepage is down more than desktop. The desktop vs. mobile performance is kind of a case by case situation, since I haven't really seen any patterns that encompass all brands).
Thanks!
-
WWW SEO,
Mind dropping us a link to the website in question so we can take a closer look? This will allow me to check your tracking implementation and to do a quick check on other factors that may be causing an issue here.
Thanks!
Trenton -
Hey Matt! I'm still trying to figure this out. I'm wondering if it's in part a tracking "issue" or inconsistency. I was looking through both desktop and mobile traffic and they are both down, so it's not like one or the other is the main driver. Organic traffic contribution continues to be down year over year.
Before we moved our sites over to the new platform, some traffic had been directed to a Country Selection page (I can't remember all the details behind this at the moment). When comparing year over year data (we use Omniture), we're including traffic that came through the Country Selection page and went through to the US site. I don't know if there's something with this particular page, or if we are indeed comparing apples to apples by leaving it in (without it, homepage is up. Category pages are generally up across all brands).
Still a lot of digging to do and I keep coming up at dead ends, it seems.
-
Hi WWW SEO! How is this going? We'd love an update.
-
What is direct traffic doing?
And have does mobile organic compare to desktop organic year-on-year?
-
I can take a closer look into competitors and see what's going on there. The way our meta descriptions are structured is first a call out of "official site" (we've noticed a better CTR by calling this out in both organic and paid), action verb, targeted keywords, and "Free shipping". In more of a consumer-friendly flow, but that's the basic structure of call outs.
-
You could perhaps ignore the brand search interest, or the keywords that are being searched by Google and instead look at what your site is actually delivering.
What about your meta descriptions? Use them like a sales pitch & compare them to the other search results. I have found it is often the case that sites lose traffic in circumstances like this when a competitor ups the game & grabs more attention.
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
-
DoesHurt SEO
Hey guys, I've read mixed reviews on this. Does anyone have an answer to whether or not hiding h1 text ( ) negatively effects SEO in 2018. Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | Jason-Reid0 -
Query on Site Architecture
Hi All, When I check on my ecommerce site in one of the architecture tool in that my Ecommerce Homepage interlink with 765 pages whereas when I check few competitors and big brands then there homepage linked with 28 pages, 33, 47, 57 etc not like my site 765 pages. Do I am wrong anywhere? Can you please check the screenshot of mine & one of the competitor's site architecture? Because as per me site architecture also play good role in google organic ranking. vXs5dh2 16wre
Technical SEO | | pragnesh96390 -
Micro-site homepage not being indexed
http://www.reebok.com/en-US/reebokonehome/ This is a homepage for an instructor network micro-site on Reebok.com The robots.txt file was excluding the /en-US/ directory, we've since removed that exclusion, and resubmitted this URL for indexing via Google Webmaster but we are still not seeing it in the index. Any advice would be very helpful, we may be missing some blocking issue or perhaps we just need to wait longer?
Technical SEO | | PatrickDugan0 -
SEO for sub domains
I've recently started to work on a website that has been previously targeting sub domain pages on its site for its SEO and has some ok rankings. To better explain, let me give an example...A site is called domainname.com. And has subdomains that they are targeted for seo (i.e. pageone.domainname.com, pagetwo.domainname.com, pagethree.domianname.com). The site is going through a site re-development and can reorganise its pages to another URL. What would be best way to approach this situation for SEO? Ideally, I'm tempted to recommend that new targeted pages be created - domainname.com/pageone, domainname.com/pagetwo, domainname.com/pagethree, etc - and to perform a 301 redirect from the old pages. Does a subdomain page structure (e.g. pageone.domainname.com) have any negative effects on SEO? Also, is there a good way to track rankings? I find that a lot of rank checkers don't pick up subdomains. Any tips on the best approach to take here would be appreciated. Hope I've made sense!
Technical SEO | | Gavo0 -
Best practice for eCommerce site migration, should I 301 redirect or match URLs on new site
Hi Guys, I have been struggling with this one for quite some time. I am no SEO expert like many of you, rather just a small business owner trying to do the right thing, so forgive me if I say something that makes no sense 🙂 I am moving our eCommerce store from one platform to another, in the process the store is getting a massive face lift. The part I am struggling with is whether I should keep my existing URL structure in place or use 301 redirects to create a cleaner looking URLs. Currently the URLs are a little long and I would love to move to a /category/product_name type format. Of course the goal is not to lose ranking in the process, I rank pretty well for several competitive phrases and do not want to create a negative impact. How would you guys handle this? Thanks, Dinesh
Technical SEO | | MyFairyTaleBooks0 -
Doing SEO for site that publishes articles everyday?
Hi, I was wondering on the best way to do SEO for a site that publishes articles daily. In other words, I add a new url to my site daily. How should I ensure that the new pages are optimized? Do I need to submit each new site to search engines? Any tips?
Technical SEO | | waltergah0 -
What to do if my site was De-indexed?
Hello fellow SEOs, I have been doing SEO for about a year now, I'm not expert, but I know enough to get the job done. I'm learning everyday about better techniques. So enough about that... Tonight I noticed that my site has, I believe, been de-indexed. Its a fairly new site, as we just launched it a few days ago and I went in and did all the title tags and meta. I still have to go in to do the h1 and h2 tags...plus add some alt tags and anchor text. Well anyways, after a couple of days after the title tags were implemented. I was propagating all over the place. Using my keyword tool here...I was number on the first page in Google for 71 or the 88 keywords. My new site was just indexed yesterday and thats when i noticed all my keywords. Well today I noticed that I am no where to be found, even if i type in my company's name. PLEASE help me out...any advice would be appreciated. Thank you. p.s. could my competitors could have done something to my site? just wondering... The website is www.eggheadconsultants.com
Technical SEO | | Jegghead1 -
Will frequently adding and frequently removing pages from my site hinder any SEO?
Hi Guys, Just looking through our crawl diagnositcs and we have a ton errors, well over 5000 actually, on 404 pages that cannot be accessed. Our website runs a lot of "Hot Offers" that are time bound, so they expire at the end of each month and we remove the page via our CMS. It's making the crawl diagnositcs loook bad, but will this be hindering our seo and Google 'stuff' because they are finding thousands of 404 errors? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Website: www.vospers.com Lee Greenhill
Technical SEO | | lee_greenhill0