Sudden drop in traffic in April and stagnant since then
-
Hi, I am the editor at a travel website based in Singapore (www.tripzilla.com). In mid April, we suffered a drop out of the blue and in total, it was a 20% drop overall. We post about 2-3 new articles a day, and we do research our keywords. I have also been updating our older ranking articles but seems like it's not really working. In May, we only received a .50% growth
I have to bring it back to speed, and I really dont understand the decline, since the "formula" of our postings has been the same since I joined the company a year ago.
Please help thank you!
-
Hi there,
Others have already mentioned great starting points. The steps I would take here in order would look something like:
- Confirm that I'm looking at the right data, and identify where the drop is coming from. Is it mostly the blog? A certain section? Top performing pages? Homepage? Or is it more of an all around drop to most pages?
- Once you answer the first question, it will allow you to prioritize where to look. If you identify most of the drop happened on your blog for example, you can focus your attention there to answer questions like, "Have we changed anything on the blog recently from a technical perspective?", "Are we confident there is nothing that is stopping us from ranking technically?", etc.
- The more difficult situation is when there is a general decrease in traffic to most pages on the site (doesn't seem to be a rhyme or a reason). In these cases I would look back at what updates have affected the site before to see a trend. When did the drop happen? Does that drop line up with a recent update? If so, what was that update about? Then some form of a technical audit, content audit, etc would be reasonable next steps to essentially identify the biggest issues in each.
Some other points in no particular order
- Remember that more content/pages does not necessarily mean more traffic. Because your formula was working a year ago doesn't mean it will work now (or work as well).
- Looking at your site briefly, you have a good amount of content (~17,000 pages) but it's difficult to navigate and find articles. If I had to guess, I'd say the site could benefit from a re-design and content overhaul/audit to ensure there are not too many overlapping pages and that they are easily discoverable by users (and crawlers).
I know that's a bit of a brain dump but hope that (along with other response) helps point you to a starting point!
-
Hi, really hope to get feedback from the experts here
-
Hi! Thanks for the replies.
As far as I'm concerned there has been no major site changes. In fact, I even ramped up my keyword planning for our articles beginning March.
In the first screenshot, you can see we were growing nicely until April when it dropped and it has remained low since.
Second is a collection of screengrabs from search console. Third is traffic sources - interesting to see the drop from IA...
And no, I don't think we were affected by any algo changes.
Thanks so much!
-
Hello,
Look through Google Search Console & see what pages have dropped, compare March to June 2018, if you could post that report somewhere I can assist you from there.
As Kevin mentioned, did you change the site at all?
-
Some questions to help you analyze:
-
Was it an overall drop in traffic or for specific articles?
-
Did you check your Google Search Console for any messages or did you analyze performance report or etc?
-
Did you look to see any Google Algo Changes?
-
Did you see any drop in Bing Organics?
-
Any major site changes?
Good luck!
-
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
-
Lost almost all organic traffic. Need some help.
Hi Mozers. I blog about our son with Down syndrome (https://noahsdad.com) and you may remember me from this case study here on Moz. https://moz.com/blog/seventeen-ways-to-improve-your-blog-case-study I was getting close to 100,000k a month in organic traffic to our blog, then it slowly started to decline to the point where I am not only getting 3k in organic traffic a month. So basically I lost all of my traffic. I honestly have no idea what is going on or why this happened. I know everyone is busy but would anyone be up for taking a peak into my GA and search console and seeing if you can figure out what may have changed and why my traffic dropped off so much. Our website helps a lot of people so you'd be doing some good and it may even be a good case study post! Thanks so much!
Content Development | | NoahsDad0 -
Great content/news articles - but struggling to drive traffic from them
We publish 2-3 great quality news stories/posts on our sites weekly, but are struggling to gain traffic from external sources for them, other than our own blog and socials. We have followings for each of our sites, but want to expand and get our posts found in other relevant blogs, features, releases etc. The posts are 'Top 10 Tips...', 'How To... in 6 Easy Steps', 'What Makes a Great...' etc. All great things that people want to read about and share. All this of course helps towards the SEO of the sites, but the posts aren't written for that, they are written to guide and inform. My question is, how are other people getting their great content found online, talked about and shared? I personally think that our posts are awesome; containing useful information that will help people. Isn't that what it's all about?
Content Development | | bricktech0 -
Any thoughts on QuickSprout and their Traffic U program?
Gotten a few emails recently about their latest promotion. Just wondering if anybody here uses that system (program, method,??) and can share their experiences?
Content Development | | GregB1230 -
Ways to generate more targeted traffic ?
We just redesigned our website and the work is still on, but it went live and we are stating to get some good page views now. THE URL is http://www.qubesys.com/blog/ My questions what is the various ways to drive more traffic to such tech blogs. We have an auto social poster app installed which randomly selects from our 350 posts and publishes to FB, Twitter, Google+ of all of our 15 employees every hour. And we get some good Social traffic through that. But what are the other ways ? Shall I invite guest bloggers to submit their blogs into our blog, so they can get a link and we can get some more unique contents ? Or any other methods to get natural traffic, as organic traffic is already happening but its very slow, like 300-500 visits from google.
Content Development | | monali1230 -
Best way to publish FAQs to capture long tail traffic?
If you want to target long tail traffic from commonly asked questions what is the best way to publish answers to these questions? A really long FAQ page, a new page for each question in a /faq/ subfolder, adding them to relevant product pages that already exist? Is creating a new page for each question a problem because the answer might be a paragraph and Google doesn't like thin content?
Content Development | | ProjectLabs0 -
My Wordpress traffic has gone through the roof, huge referrals from wordpress.com - why?
My Wordpress traffic has hit an all time high over the last few days - in the last 48 hours I've had as many views as the last two months combined. This huge spike in traffic has coincided with a great piece of exclusive content that went up, but I wouldn't expect the traffic to be nearly as high as this. The strange thing is that all the extra traffic seems to be referred from Wordpress.com, however, I cannot drill down to a more specific URL. Also, the referrals do not seem to translate into page views of the homepage, nor a particular article. Can anyone offer any insight into this situation? Thanks
Content Development | | pugh0 -
Advice Needed Just Dropped From PR 8 to PR6 - What Do I Do
Hi SEOMoz, I am the GM of http://www.scoop.co.nz Today (or possibly yesterday) we dropped from PR 8 to PR6. Have we been penalised by Panda 2? If so what do we do? I have seen posts about seeking a reconsideration, or something but do not know who to contact or what to ask. best regards
Content Development | | althecat0 -
Word Press site traffic plumit
Hi, I have a client who has a word press site that we put together for him. We have noticed that over approximately the last 2 months his sites traffic has plumitied - its gone from a health 200+ per day and sharply decresaed and is not practically zero. Has anyone got any ideas of why this might be? Here is the link to the site - http://wheelworldreviews.co.uk/ Thanks
Content Development | | Tinderbox0