Ranking well for main key terms but site traffic has dropped sharply?
-
Hello All,
Just a quick question.
Since the penguin update our site www.caravanguard.co.uk has seen some pretty fluctuating movement in Google, many of our key terms dropped over night, but over the last few weeks they have slowly started to move back up the rankings.
The bizarre thing is despite the recover in rankings our unique traffic has taken a fairly large whack in numbers. Seasonality? Weather? ( it's been nice in the UK for a change)
I can only assume the longer tail terms are taking more time to recover. I have tried to look into our back link profile and have noticed a little too much in terms concise keyword targeting, How do you go about changing these terms and removing the really bad links (struggling to identify the worst cases) on totally irrelevant sites or poor directories.
Put in place before I started here
Any help truly appreciated.
Regards
Tim
-
I have been looking at the organic keyword search position rankings on Google. I think
-
The bizarre thing is despite the recover in rankings our unique traffic has taken a fairly large whack in numbers. Seasonality? Weather? ( it's been nice in the UK for a change)
What rankings are you looking at? There are image rankings, blog rankings, news rankings. I'd bet on images.
-
Thanks for the insight Sven,
I have a had a look over the stats for the main keywords in our analytics and there is certainly a downward trend for our main keywords. I have been keeping track of the Ranking for our main terms via the rankings tool on SEO moz - we dropped as low as 10 from around position 5 since the Penguin update. In the last ranking results we had climbed back up to 8.
According to Google Queries we have had no impressions or clicks for our main terms for the last three days - I am hoping this is due to it needing time to catch up.... otherwise something is very wrong.
Due to the seasonality of our market, as soon as the weather is nice people go out in their motorhomes and caravans, this will also affect traffic to a degree.
NOTE - just looked in webmaster tools - this does only go up to the 27th of May not to the 30th so a couple of days behind.
-
Hi Tim,
Do you have Google Analytics installed? If so it should be possible to find out what's happening! This is what I'd do:
-
Get the 100 best performing keywords for january - march.
-
Get the 100 best performing keywords for the past two weeks.
-
see which keywords you used to get traffic on but currently don't get traffic on.
-
if you still rank for these keywords, it's probably because of search volumes and if you don't rank first page for these keywords it's because of your rankings. (probably).
Obviously it's a bit more tricky if your long tail rankings only dropped slightly. If that's the case you could try to find out for which keywords you used to get >10% of the search volume in visitors. It's higly likely that you used to rank top 3 for these words. If you rank 6th or 7th for these keywords now you probably lost some ground there.
Also you can checkout the search engine optimization feature in Google Analytics in case you have GA linked to your webmastertools.
This is why it's important to document your rankings over time (on lot's of keywords). You could use a ranktracker for that.
Best of luck!
Sven Witteveen
Expand Online
-
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
-
Seeing some really bad sites that ranked in my niche years ago reaching 1st page
It started after the update about 4 websites form the 1st page dropped to the 2nd and 4 of the other sites just popped back to the 1st page and the bad part is that the Da and inbound links of these sites are really bad, so my question is must we just wait this out till Google realises how bad these site are and some of them haven't been updated in years links broken i can go on and on. what these sites have is just the age of the domains, but can this really be the main focus of these results?
Algorithm Updates | | johan80 -
Sub-directory pages must be optimised well?
Hi all, We have help pages as sub-directory which have been linked from our website pages (3 clicks depth). But these pages are not well optimised with minor issues like header tags, image alts, etc...Moreover some of these pages are dead-end pages. Will these things hurt us? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Ranking For Synonyms Without Creating Duplicate Content.
We have 2 keywords that are synonyms we really need to rank for as they are pretty much interchangeable terms. We will refer to the terms as Synonym A and Synonym B. Our site ranks very well for Synonym A but not for Synonym B. Both of these terms carry the same meaning, but the search results are very different. We actively optimize for Synonym A because it has the higher search volume of the 2 terms. We had hoped that Synonym B would get similar rankings due to the fact that the terms are so similar, but that did not pan out for us. We have lots of content that uses Synonym A predominantly and some that uses Synonym B. We know that good content around Synonym B would help, but we fear that it may be seen as duplicate if we create a piece that’s “Top 10 Synonym B” because we already have that piece for Synonym A. We also don’t want to make too many changes to our existing content in fear we may lose our great ranking for Synonym A. Has anyone run into this issue before, or does anyone have any ideas of things we can do to increase our position for Synonym B?
Algorithm Updates | | Fuel0 -
How much link juice does a sites homepage pass to inner pages and influence inner page rankings?
Hi, I have a question regarding the power of internal links and how much link juice they pass, and how they influence search engine ranking positions. If we take the example of an ecommerce store that sells kites. Scenario 1 It can be assumed that it is easier for the kite ecommerce store to earn links to its homepage from writing great content on its blog, as any blogger that will link to the content will likely use the site name, and homepage as anchor text. So if we follow this through, then it can be assumed that there will eventually be a large number of high quality backlinks pointing to the sites homepage from various high authority blogs that love the content being posted on the sites blog. The question is how much link juice does this homepage pass to the category pages, and from the category pages then to the product pages, and what influence does this have on rankings? I ask because I have seen strong ecommerce sites with very strong DA or domain PR but with no backlinks to the product page/category page that are being ranked in the top 10 of search results often, for the respective category and product pages. It therefore leads me to assume that internal links must have a strong determiner on search rankings... Could it therefore also be assumed that a site with a PR of 5 and no links to a specific product page, would rank higher than a site with a PR of 1 but with 100 links pointing to the specific product page? Assuming they were both trying to rank for the same product keyword, and all other factors were equal. Ie. neither of them built spammy links or over optimised anchor text? Scenario 2 Does internal linking work both ways? Whereas in my above example I spoke about the homepage carrying link juice downward to the inner category and product pages. Can a powerful inner page carry link juice upward to category pages and then the homepage. For example, say the blogger who liked the kite stores blog content piece linked directly to the blog content piece from his site and the kite store blog content piece was hosted on www.xxxxxxx.com/blog/blogcontentpiece As authority links are being built to this blog content piece page from other bloggers linking to it, will it then pass link juice up to the main blog category page, and then the kite sites main homepage? And if there is a link with relevant anchor text as part of the blog content piece will this cause the link juice flowing upwards to be stronger? I know the above is quite winded, but I couldn't find anywhere that explains the power of internal linking on SERP's... Look forward to your replies on this....
Algorithm Updates | | sanj50500 -
Rankings drop
Hi! Since the new Penguin rollout, we've seen rankings drop for http://www.leanonturkey.co.uk/ for the terms 'turkey recipes' (UK) and 'low fat recipes' (UK) from #4 and #15 respectively. This may be down to very strong competition, but I'm also concerned over the on-page content, which may not be detailed enough. Any tips would be much appreciated!
Algorithm Updates | | neooptic0 -
Privacy page ranking above home page in serps
I'm using OSE to try and get some clues as to why my privacy page would rank higher than my home page. Could anyone help me figure out which metrics to review to rectify the issue? My key word is: Mardi Gras Parade Tickets The url that is ranking is <cite>www.mardigrasparadetickets.com/pages/privacy</cite> I'm happy to be ranking in the top 3 for the keyword, but I'd rather hoped it wouldn't be my privacy page. Any help would be awesome, Cy
Algorithm Updates | | Nola5040 -
After optimising for SEO my ranking went down...
Hello, My website was ranking for over 100 keywords but was not really optimised properly. For example, the page title was much too long, it was segmented like this: "keyword - Category - domain " I followed recommandations in SEOMOZ and I removed the domain and category from the long page titles to only leave the keyword and updated the H1 to reflect also the keyword. We dropped in ranking since even though we did not change anything, only made things more SEO optimised. I don't understand how it made us drop in ranking?? David
Algorithm Updates | | DavidSpivac0 -
What is the best way to build a Mobile Site?
I am looking into building a mobile version for my website, knowing that Google Likes Google should I stick with using their mobile building tool or build something from scratch in Dreamweaver? How to optimize for Google Mobile? Thx
Algorithm Updates | | Ben-HPB0