SEO Rankings Ebbs and Flows on Ecommerce Site - Normal?
-
Hey everyone,
I should start by saying I'm very new to SEO (I'm actually just a copywriter that's taken on this role at an agency), so I apologize if I'm using some common terms incorrectly or if there's a lack of information.
I've been optimizing my first ecommerce website (clothing company), and things were going very well last year. Strong surges in organic traffic, peaking in the summer. There was a drop before the holidays when the client dumped a ton of new product pages that weren't optimized. After optimizing the pages, the traffic went back up to its summer levels.
Now, there's about a 10% drop in organic traffic since earlier this year, and a loss of just over 20% of keywords the site was originally ranking for. There's no sharp drop in the Analytics, but a steady decline. To give a better idea, the site was ranking for 5,270 keywords in February; it's dropped to 3,772 keywords in April. According to SEMRush, almost all the dropped keywords are the lower volume ones, maybe indicating long tail keywords?
I'm really not sure what the cause of the drop is, as I've been following (I think) best on-page practices, which seems to have yielded results last year. One thing I should mention is the client has a unique product page for each variant of one product (so the same shirt will have 10 of the same pages, the only difference being the colour). Could Google be penalizing the site for duplicate content? It was fine last year though with that same site structure; I'm not sure how long it would take for Google to penalize a site for that.
Sorry for the wall of text. I'd really appreciate any insight into this. Thanks Moz community!
-
Not a problem
-
This is great insight, thanks for taking the time to reply!
-
Might be business related and not SEO related, did you consider that? If new products dropping can impact SEO - what about removed products?
If removed products are taken down completely from the site (their pages disappear) and / or they are then redirected, obviously those rankings drop significantly or disappear
Certain products are very popular, will bring more traffic to your site. Think about how SEO can inform product stocking choices, help decide what gets added or removed. If stuff is just being deactivated willy-nilly, for products which are highly popular - obviously loss will occur. Doesn't mean things are terribly optimised (though you could probably do some work there, like creating "this product is currently unavailable" pages - which still show product info, but make it clear it's out of stock and maybe give users the option of letting you know that they want it back)
It may just mean, bad decisions were made at the business level - because you were only using SEO as an output, not as an input
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
-
Ecommerce question - overoptimisation
Hi there, I'm the owner of this site http://goo.gl/76Mrbd and I have a newbie question We have a large number of vintage clothing items, and for SEO purposes I would like to rank for keywords "vintage insert designer name". I've been titling all our items with the phrase "vintage insert designer skirt/dress/pants etc" - but I've noticed that when we google these phrases - an example being "vintage moschino" we don't rank for them at all, despite the fact that each individual page gets a decent "page optimisation score" for that particular keyword. Many people have suggested to me that the reason this is so is because we're using the keyword too much on our site, but I can't get my head around how to fix this. What would be the best way to restructure our product descriptions so that we can fix this? Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | clare_f1 -
Ranking problem.
Hello, Using Moz I can see that my ranks for my site ZenPlugs.com for keywords such as 'ear plugs' and 'molded ear plugs' and several other keywords aren't as high as other sites with similar DAs. I can't see why, am I missing something? Many thanks, Toby
On-Page Optimization | | T0BY0 -
Looking for an SEO Expert
We're overwhelmed with client work and looking to hire an SEO professional to handle our local rankings and give us a fresh perspective. Feel free to message me privately or reply here. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | ScottImageWorks0 -
Linking Out To External Sites
Hi, All If I have created a (website, logo, email campaign) for a client and written an article about it with screen shots on my website and link to them with a (do-follow) link how does Google see the (do-follow) link? Regards to the sites they have one link in the footer on the home page, which is a (do-follow) back to our site. Also, the websites are not in my Niche.
On-Page Optimization | | deskjet0 -
Changing to Friendly SEO Urls
This is my site, example of a product : [Link removed] Would I lose rank in Google for changing all to friendly SEO urls? Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | 7liberty0 -
On-page SEO optimization
hi there! Is it possible not to be in the first 20 or 30 positions in the SERPs after executing onpage SEO actions (keyword optimization, metatags, ....) even for keywords for which there's not "too much" competition? Is there a way of visualize the pages indexed by the google bot? (the pages especifically, not the number) in order to discard indexing problems? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr1 -
Site Structure
I'm confused about the best way for seo to set up the site structure . i understand the examples of the pyramid diagrams and how link juice flows, however does this mean that global navigation is not good? It appears the pyramid structure leads to the designated number of category pages (we'll use five) and they lead to the 5 content pages etc and some "superman pages" can be linked to from the home page but is this is global navigation or anchor text navigation and is gloval navigation acdeptable for content pages? Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | JulB0 -
Improve Site SEO
Hey Guys I was wondering if you could give me advice to improving my SEO. I have used all the tools on this site and have improved it a lot already, but wondering if there is any glaring issues, that I could fix now www.treelifedesigns.com
On-Page Optimization | | treelifedesigns0