Help! Need to Get Traffic Back Up in Saturated Market
-
I was looking in one of my client's Google Analytics profiles, and noticed that they had two major drops in traffic before we started working with them—and they've never really recovered. The first, and most significant drop was around January 2015. And then the again, but not as drastic of a drop, was around September 2015. They are a heating and cooling company, but they are located out west so this shouldn't be a seasonality thing.
Here is a link to what the BIG drop is traffic looks like in January 2015: http://imgur.com/a/Y1s8U
To get a clearer picture, here are the numbers for the overall website traffic:
September 1, 2015 - September 30, 2015: 30,923 sessions
September 1, 2015 - September 30, 2016: 13,768 sessionsYear over year traffic to the website dropped by 55%.
Here is a link to what year over year looks like in Google Analytics: http://imgur.com/a/TPdJQ
Like I said, we weren't working with them at the time so I don't know specifics about what might have caused this, but their numbers have never even come close to reaching what they used to be prior to the noticeable drop after September 2015.
Does anyone have any insights into why this might be? Was there an algorithm change back then that could still be impacting them? Any ideas how to get them back to where they once were?
Any input is greatly appreciated! Thanks.
-
Hey there, I have to be honest that from the screenshots you posted this looks fairly normal to me? I mean, it may be helpful to see the full traffic so we can see what's happening, but it seems that they had a big spike and then it dropped back down, and has been building after that with more spikes and then returning to a normal growth curve.
What am I missing?
-
Thank you, Zack! I will definitely check out these resources.
-
Since you've already checked for seasonality, here are a couple other places I'd recommend checking:
- Google Trends: Have other similar businesses out there seen a similar decrease as well?
- Google Algorithm Change History: Did anything happen around the dates mentioned that could have impacted site rankings?
Best,
Zack
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
-
PDF best practices: to get them indexed or not? Do they pass SEO value to the site?
All PDFs have landing pages, and the pages are already indexed. If we allow the PDFs to get indexed, then they'd be downloadable directly from google's results page and we would not get GA events. The PDFs info would somewhat overlap with the landing pages info. Also, if we ever need to move content, we'd now have to redirects the links to the PDFs. What are best practices in this area? To index or not? What do you / your clients do and why? Would a PDF indexed by google and downloaded directly via a link in the SER page pass SEO juice to the domain? What if it's on a subdomain, like when hosted by Pardot? (www1.example.com)
Reporting & Analytics | | hlwebdev1 -
Dark Traffic Mystery!
Hey everyone, My team and I have been digging into this problem and can't find an answer - and it turns out this has been an issue for over year. I'll try to explain the best I can, but let me know if you have any questions. My predecessor noticed a non-existent page URL getting traffic in GA. He had the web dev team create a page so he could see where the traffic is coming from. The page has every directive under the sun on it; noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir, noimageindex, notranslate All of the traffic is (direct) / (none). It gets about 300 visits per day. Avg. time on page is 15:40, bounce rate is 99.6% and it doesn't show up in the funnel. Previous page path is 92% entrance; 8% homepage. Geo is 92% US; then diversified across countries. Browser is predominately Chrome. OS is only Windows, and device is only desktop. I've run this page through a backlink checker, and we get nothing. I've run it through Screaming Frog and it has no internal links pointing to it. I've tried putting quotes around the URL and googling it and we get a few websites, but they're very low authority and it isn't likely that they're sending 300+ visits per day. Also, since all of the traffic is direct, I don't think it's coming from a backlink anyway. This has become a personal quest for several of us, as we really want to figure out where that traffic is coming from. Any thoughts? What am I missing? It's kind of driving me crazy because I can't figure out what I've missed, so if anyone figures this out and is coming to Pubcon in November, I'll buy you a beer!! 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | rachelmeyer0 -
60% of Direct traffic is actually Organic
For some pre-reading, Groupon experimented with deindexing part of their site back in 2014 and found that they had a big drop in direct traffic: http://searchengineland.com/60-direct-traffic-actually-seo-195415 Recently I've conducted a similar test on a very large site and have found that Direct dropped somewhere between 50-80% for the pages deindexed, depending on the day (It has been running for ~4 days). Has anyone else tried this experiment before? If so what were your results?
Reporting & Analytics | | Leads.Bz
What I'm most interested in now is to find out why this traffic is classed as Direct - there appears to be no reason why the site or server would interfere, so I can only imagine that Google is sending traffic without referrer data. Does anyone have any thoughts as to why they would do that?0 -
Is there an automated way to determine which pages of your website are getting 0 traffic?
I'm doing a content audit on my company website and want to identify pages with zero traffic. I can use GA for low traffic, but not zero traffic. I can do this manually, but it would take a long time. Are there any tools to help me determine these pages?
Reporting & Analytics | | Ksink0 -
Bing Webmaster Tools data discrepency on traffic
Hi, For a given time period in Bing Webmaster Tools it says that combined clicks from Bing and Yahoo organic search are about 4,700 total, for the same time period in Google Analytics, combining sessions for Bing and Yahoo Organic comes out to about 8,900 total. Has anyone else experienced this discrepancy? Is this common? How can I get 8900 visits from 4700 clicks?
Reporting & Analytics | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
How can I get the Google Analytics advanced segments beta?
Is there a way that I can get access to the Google Analytics new segmenting features? I've been reading about them for some months now, but still nothing in my GA account. Thank you in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | LinusB0 -
How to see organic traffic only?
Im having trouble separating our organic traffic vs our PPC. When I go into Analytics>Traffic>Sources>Search>Organic, its giving me numbers that are not accurate. I believe whats happening is that its not able to distinguish our bing organic/ppc. Is using Webmaster tools Search Queries a more accurate way to determine organic search volume?
Reporting & Analytics | | DemiGR0 -
Google Webmaster Preferred Domain Settings Help
I was recently running my SEO Moz report for my domain and saw a drastic drop in page rankings on the report. After some trouble shooting, I checked my Google Webmaster Tools and saw the "Preferred Domain for my Site has changed" the last week in which I saw the drastic drop. Under the "preferred domain" area, I have it set to www.marware.com but on most of the links to my site, it reads www.marware.com/ . We also have http://marware.com , but am not sure if this carries any relevance as the preferred domain is set for www.marware.com . Does the "/" make a difference in the "Preferred Domain" section? If so, how do I update it? Is there a way to confirm it is set up correctly? In the photo attached, what does "Linked Property" "Analytics Web Property" and "Associated Webmaster Tools Site" mean? Thanks in advance! T5tSCxm
Reporting & Analytics | | Khadaran0