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
-
Will SEO Blogs Divert Traffic from Main Web pages using same keywords?
Our company has drafted several SEO blogs using certain keywords. If we post these SEO blogs to our website and social media channels , and the blog keywords are also used on our main website pages, will the blogs divert or dilute traffic to our main web pages? Thank you for your expertise and insights in advance.
Content Development | | Johnenchroma0 -
Project content marketing SEO value and Traffic
I'm creating a content marketing plan and need to project the visitor impact it could have on an exact-keyword domain name. The plan will produce at least 10 quality, original articles per day. Are there any common metrics or ways to guess what the visitor impact could be?
Content Development | | msantore821 -
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 -
Sudden drop in rankings. Please help.
Hi guys I am Ujjwal. I am no SEO guru or anything I am just a blogger with basic knowledge of SEO. Yesterday on 6th August 2013 my rankings for many keywords suddenly dropped and I don't know why. Can someone please tell me why it happened and how I can fix it? I really need help Site url: http://www.droidextra.org/ Thanks
Content Development | | ujjwalk3081 -
How to make a bad posting drop down the search engines
we have had a competitor who has been stealing a lot of content from us and now they have used seo tactics to write a bad article about one of our sites that they have been taking content from, and what we would like to do is to use seo techniques to drop their article down the rankings. We are consulting a solicitor to take action against them as we are fed up of the content being stolen and the other techniques they are using, can anyone give me ideas on the best way to drop this post down the rankings. I was thinking about articles and press releases and blog posts to get higher up in the rankings and do a lot of these to drop their article down the rankings. Our solicitor has already taken action against them in the past and that cost us a fortune and it looks like we are going to have to spend a fortune again, so any help on using seo techniques to drop their article down the rankings would be great.
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
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 -
How to recover my traffic? How to make a boring subject interesting?
Hi all, your feedback would be hugely appreciated. I've had a mortgage website for about a year and half now that I've painstakingly filled with relevant, informative content. I've seen my traffic ranking in Alexa go from > 14,000,000 a year ago to right around 1,000,000 today, but I got hit really hard in the recent Google updates. I lost about 60% of my traffic at the end of April and have been at a loss as to what to do about it. I wasn't doing anything shady to generate traffic, so my guess is that some of my backlinks were discounted in the update, so my site got hit in the rankings. Now I'm really trying to rework my site to get my traffic back. What would you suggest? I feel almost like I'm starting at square one again because all my efforts thus far got hammered in the updates. Currently I'm updating and reworking some of my content to format it better, make the site more navigable, and better optimize the content for the search engines. I've also hired a virtual assistant to manage my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts to help build traffic that way. I'm keeping up with blogging on a regular basis as well, but it's such a big time suck when I'm trying to get loans funded full time as well. Also, mortgages is kind of a boring subject. Who the heck would want to come back to my site every day and read about mortgages? How can I make the subject interesting and fun so that people want to come back on regular basis? I'm new here and your thoughts are most welcome! Feel free to unleash the tough criticisms too! My site is mortgagesbymark.com if you'd like to take a look at it. Thanks!
Content Development | | MortgagesByMark1 -
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