Organic Traffic Decrease WOW and YOY sitewide
-
My site is experiencing a decrease in organic traffic WOW for the last two weeks and for the first time all year is showing a decrease compared to last year's traffic for the same weeks. At first I thought this was a seasonal pattern due to spring break (we are mostly b to b), but the dip has sustained for another week. The only changes made during this time period were a few on-page updates and some title tag updates to a specific group of pages. However, the decrease is sitewide including branded clicks and impressions. I haven't noticed any changes in rankings. Impressions and clicks are down per Search Console, but CTR and Avg Rank haven't changed. Is it possible that we've been penalized or hit by an algo shift? What's the best way to know for sure?
-
It might be that your updated title tag language is decreasing clicks through to your site - so you're still ranking the same, but not as many people are clicking. Since you're wanting to target a more qualified audience, this dip in traffic might not be a bad thing if you're seeing a higher conversion rate or more qualified leads. If you're running AdWords, it might be worth testing both versions of the language from your title tags in ads to see if that is impacting your click-through rate.
-
I checked traffic trends in Adwords and Google Trends, and there was some decrease around spring break, but it wasn't sustained and we didn't see a similar dip last year. Traffic is starting to come back, but still trailing last month significantly. We did add some language to our title tags that targets more of a niche/qualified audience on some of our pages. I haven't seen a decline in rankings or avg rank in GWT, but now I'm wondering if this is somehow related. Anyone have this type of experience before?
-
Hi cckapow!
Any update on this? Did you ever get to checking the AdWords traffic, as Robert suggested?
-
Based solely on how you have written this, it is hard to believe it is algo change or any type of penalty. If you are ranking in the same places and CTR is same, it would seem that overall traffic for those terms is down. I realize it is not yet a month but have you checked the terms in Adwords to see if traffic is off this month?
Best,
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
-
Traffic Dropped, Rankings Unchanged | Impression and Click Drop %75
Hi all, Last Update was good for us; we got a quick %300 boost to one of our pages https://www.buyurken.com/gebelik-hesaplama-cetveli/. We have been waiting for the page to rank higher at the short tail keyword this month. However last Saturday, Our traffic dropped %78 instantly compared to previous day last week. Search Console Report says; Click: 1050 Impression: 2500 Pos: #1 Date: 26 Jan, 2020 Click: 1250 Impression: 2760 Pos: #1 Date: 28 Jan, 2020 Click: 1268 Impression: 2808 Pos: #1 .1 Date: 30 Jan, 2020 *****Click: 183 Impression: 707 Pos: #1 . 5 Date: 01 Feb, 2020 . !! ** What you'll realize, the impression and clicks dropped drastically but the avg. position nearly stay the same. Have anyone faced a situation like this. There are no Featured Snippets or Advertisement for this query "gebelik hesaplama 2020". NOTE: There's no server response time problem There's no technical issue for that page Pagespeed has been increased more than %50 at 26 January 2020 Avg. Page Visit time 3 mins+ Bounce is %85 however, this is a tool for pregnant; they just calculate and go back to search engine. Waiting for your responses, Regards, Have a nice week all Fatih Dilekci
Technical SEO | | fdilekcimoz20 -
Organic traffic drops a lot
Please check my url that is https://www.drmalpani.com , it was first build up in Joomla and then for security reason, I moved from Joomla to Laravel but in that mean time, I have facing steep fall in organic traffics. It was earlier 10,000 users per day and now I can see only 2500 users per day. I don't know what went wrong, each url are same as it was in Joomla as well I have worked out on all 404 urls too. Looking forward to your guidance on this. Thanks, Bharat
Technical SEO | | DrMalpani0 -
Organizing A Backlink Authority Category Page
I work for a company that has many promotions throughout the year, some big, some HUGE. Typically they have created a landing page for this content. The issue is, when this promotion ends, we will kill the landing page, thus 404ing the backlinks and putting the page authority in purgatory. (1) What would be the best way the keep these pages organized? I was thinking about creating a main "Promotions" page with the current promotion on it (the previous ones linked on the bottom of the page). Then when the promotion ends I would copy those contents and add them to a new page and link to it from the original "promotions" page. An issue I see with this is that the promotions page would always have the same Title Tag and vanity URL. (2) This could provide many links to the "promotions" page over time to build it's authority, but would constantly changing content hurt ranking factors?
Technical SEO | | nat88han0 -
Why has my search traffic suddenly tanked?
On 6 June, Google search traffic to my Wordpress travel blog http://www.travelnasia.com tanked completely. There are no warnings or indicators in Webmaster Tools that suggest why this happened. Traffic from search has remained at zero since 6 June and shows no sign of recovering. Two things happened on or around 6 June. (1) I dropped my premium theme which was proving to be not mobile friendly and replaced it with the ColorMag theme which is responsive. (2) I relocated off my previous hosting service which was showing long server lag times to a faster host. Both of these should have improved my search performance, not tanked it. There were some problems with the relocation to the new web host which resulted in a lot of "out of memory" errors on the website for 3-4 days. The allowed memory was simply not enough for the complexity of the site and the volume of traffic. After a few days of trying to resolve these problems, I moved the site to another web host which allows more PHP memory and the site now appears reliably accessible for both desktop and mobile. But my search traffic has not recovered. I am wondering if in all of this I've done something that Google considers to be a cardinal sin and I can't see it. The clues I'm seeing include: Moz Pro was unable to crawl my site last Friday. It seems like every URL it tried to crawl was of the form http://www.travelnasia.com/wp-login.php?action=jetpack-sso&redirect_to=http://www.travelnasia.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines which resulted in a 500 status error. I don't know why this happened but I have disabled the Jetpack login function completely, just in case it's the problem. GWT tells me that some of my resource files are not accessible by GoogleBot due to my robots.txt file denying access to /wp-content/plugins/. I have removed this restriction after reading the latest advice from Yoast but I still can't get GWT to fetch and render my posts without some resource errors. On 6 June I see in Structured Data of GWT that "items" went from 319 to 1478 and "items with errors" went from 5 to 214. There seems to be a problem with both hatom and hcard microformats but when I look at the source code they seem to be OK. What I can see in GWT is that each hcard has a node called "n [n]" which is empty and Google is generating a warning about this. I see that this is because the author vcard URL class now says "url fn n" but I don't see why it says this or how to fix it. I also don't see that this would cause my search traffic to tank completely. I wonder if anyone can see something I'm missing on the site. Why would Google completely deny search traffic to my site all of a sudden without notifying any kind of penalty? Note that I have NOT changed the content of the site in any significant way. And even if I did, it's unlikely to result in a complete denial of traffic without some kind of warning.
Technical SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson1 -
Local search results appearing above Organic
Hello, I've just performed a search for the query 'outdoor clothing' using Google Incognito mode and I've added the screenshots below to show my findings. The first attempt at the search only showed local results then when I clicked search again adverts were shown. I found this very odd, normally I'd see the local results after the 3rd of 4th organic result.Have Google changed their algorithm or is this just random? http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/8643/incognito1.jpg http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/6382/incognito2jf.jpg Thanks, Dan
Technical SEO | | Sparkstone0 -
Google News Referral Traffic Gone after CMS Upgrade
Hoping someone can help. I've tried the Google forum which is it's usual vacuous hole of no help. We recently upgraded our CMS which now includes automated sitemaps (not sure if this impacts news sitemaps, though). Anyway, after rollout, we're no longer getting any traffic from Google News. Sequence of Events: 1. Dec. 13 launch 2. Google news referral traffic stopped 3. IT tried to 'fix' and now we're getting the elusive 'publication name' message The publication name specified in your Sitemap does not match the publication name we have for your site in our database. Please check that the publication name in your Sitemap exactly matches the publication name displayed for your articles in Google News. 4. Retested sitemap When I retest the news sitemap, it returns 0 errors. When I do a site:mnn.com (our website) on the Google New Homepage, new content is showing up in SERP Yet, still no google news referral traffic. Our news sitemap is www.mnn.com/googlenews.xml Can someone help? We're a news site, and can't afford to lose this traffic. Would love an early Christmas present. Thanks!! Lisa
Technical SEO | | Aggie0 -
Decrease in orders by67% on March 17, 2011
We sell some 25,000 products over the web on our site and on March 17, 2011 our orders dropped by 67% and have remained at this lower level since. Any one know of any Google changes on this date that could have caused this decrease? Thanks John
Technical SEO | | JohnMcGreevy0 -
External Sitewide Links and SEO
I have one big question about the potential SEO value -- and possibly also dangers? -- of "followed" external sitewide links. Examples of these would be: a link to your site from another site's footer a blogroll link a link to your site from another site's global navigation Aside from the link's position in the HTML file (the higher the better, presumably), are these links essentially the same from an SEO point of view or different (and how)? There used to be an influential view out there that the link juice value of a sitewide link was the same as that of a single link (presumably from the linking site's home page), even though a sitewide link may in fact result a huge number individual links. Is this true or false? What is the math here? Should one worry about having "too many" sitewide links, in the sense that this may raise red flags by way of the algo? I talked to someone a few months ago (before the recent algo updates) who believed that he had got a minus 10 penalty or whatever it was for getting too many sitewide links We offer website design and development as well as SEO, and we put a keyworded link to ourselves in the footer. I think this is a fairly common practice. Is this a good or bad idea SEO-wise? One opinion is that for external sitewide footer links, you should best have a dofollow link on the home page, but nofollow it on all other pages. What is your opinion about that? Is there anything else that is distinct, interesting or important about sitewide links' SEO value and pitfalls? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Philip-SEO1