Why do we temporarily rank for highly competitive words after writing a related blog post?
-
I write for a blog that Google probably "likes" at this point because we update so frequently and get a decent amount of traffic.
Sometimes this happens and it has always been puzzling to me:
Let's use an example. Say I write a blog called "How to eat spaghetti." For the next few days, we will get a ton of traffic for people who type "spaghetti." But when I check us on rank trackers we are nowhere to be found for that term. What is happening here? Sometimes the traffic will all be international and located in some random city in Africa or something.
Any thoughts? Super confused by this. We have gotten lots of traffic for extremely competitive words because of this, but it only lasts a couple days.
-
I figured it out. Looks like the corresponding image in that blog entry got indexed on Google Images and ranks #3 because that one hot word is in the alt tag. Crazy
-
Hey James. Thanks for the input.
Maybe I didn't explain myself correctly. In my example, I'm not trying to rank for the word "Spaghetti." But because I published one article with the word "Spaghetti" in the title, we get a ton of Google hits that week for that word, and then that traffic disappears shortly after. I honestly don't think it has much to do with social media because our blog gets very few shares....
-
I'd imagine it is more to do with subscribers, social media posts containing links, referrals and fans who have bookmarked your page etc rather than anything to do with SEO. If your rankings are not improving yet your traffic is, I'd suggest looking at your analytics to see where the traffic is actually coming from - referrals, direct traffic etc.
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
-
Angular website and ranking
Hi guys Unfortunately I have to optimize the angular website, but I don't know how google see my website. Seo quacke (seo extension) doesn't get data from this website: https://cafegardesh.com and sitemap generation tools just crawl 1 page of this website. why? How find that google really crawl and index angular website?
Reporting & Analytics | | denakalami0 -
Longterm wordpress blog not providing seo benefit to main site - help needed please
Hi I have a bigcommerce ecommerce store, with a Wordpress blog on a subdomain. The store and blog have been active for four years, the blog is regularly updated with original content, has many links to the store, is promoted regularly via my brand's social media channels and mailing list, and has the simplest SEO basics covered via a Yoast SEO plugin. But the store sees very little, if any, SEO benefit from the blog. My question is: based on this information, and the details below, is there an issue with the connection between the blog and main site in SEO terms? And if there is, how can I start fixing it? Further info: 1 In my Moz dashboard for the store site, the blog does not show at all as providing any inbound links or linking domains 2 Google Analytics also shows zero referral traffic to the store site from the blog since April 2015 3 Moz crawl issues is flagging ‘duplicate page content issues’ for pretty much every page of the blog, and the analysis provided suggests this may be related to tags but I have only basic SEO knowledge and am fast getting out of my depth here. 4 I have today altered the settings within the Yoast plugin on the blog to ‘noindex’ for Tags, Meta Robots, based on advice I have found in this section but am already well over my head and unsure even this is correct. An agency have been running SEO for the store since 2012 but since uncovering how little they have done in this time for the money paid, I am now taking matters back into my own hands. However I am on a very steep learning curve and this one is beyond me right now - please does anyone have any suggestions where I can start looking to uncover the root issue? Any guidance or advice would be greatly appreciated Thanks very much and hope to hear from someone!
Reporting & Analytics | | Warren_331 -
Google Analytics Goal/Event/SOMETHING to show only Wordpress "Posts", not pages, etc
Hi all, Our site is build on Wordpress and formerly the post URL's had the typical date format at the beginning. This made it easy for me to look at, for example, all search traffic to the blog. I would just view URL's containing /2014/ and /2015/ and boom. We have since removed the dates from the URL's with proper redirects etc, which is great, but now I can't figure out a way to look at ONLY the blog in GA. I like to track a KPI of 'search visits to blog posts' and I can't figure out how to now. Can I set up a GA event that only fires when the post type template for blog posts loads? Some other solution? I'm lost here, and there's gotta be a good way to do it...
Reporting & Analytics | | 3DR0 -
Organic Traffic Drop and Rank Increase After Video Thumbnail added
So my company has created a large amount of videos and I took a couple of them and created a test video sitemap to see what effect adding a video thumbnail/rich snippet to the SERPs would be. It worked on one page and gained 2 spots (position 6 to 4) for the highest keyword, but traffic didn't increase too much. Then a week later I tested it with the page that we get the most organic traffic for, which is ranking for a very big keyword. It worked and gained a bit of ranking, but traffic decreased 50% ever since according to Google Analytics. It seems to me that the traffic from users clicking on the video thumbnail is not be tracked as google / organic even though it lands them on the intended page/doesn't redirect anywhere else. I've looked to see if traffic to this page increased overall to see if it was being tracked via a referral or as something else, but couldn't find any traffic discrepancy. The only thing I did find is that impressions under SEO > Landing Pages > Video Property increased, but this could be from the page ranking in the Video SERPs now. Has anyone experienced a similar situation? Do you think having a video snippet could be that big of a turn off for customers that people just aren't clicking like they used to? I don't think so, that's why I'm leaning towards a tracking discrepancy in Google Analytics.
Reporting & Analytics | | OfficeFurn0 -
Why would our client's site be receiving significant levels of organic traffic for a keyword they do not rank for?
We have a client that has received 100+ organic visits for the keyword 'airport transfers', yet the site does not rank in the top 100 search results for this keyword. We have checked that it is not untagged PPC traffic. Truly baffling. Can anybody help?
Reporting & Analytics | | mrdavidingram0 -
Why does a selection of sites I have written guest posts on not come up on my link analysis?
I have done a few guests posts on different sites and they are not coming up in my link analysis report.
Reporting & Analytics | | meteorelectrical
We created an info graphic on one particular site and this site isn't coming up on the link analysis report. Would there be a reason for this. I ran a check on the sites code and it doesnt contain "nofollow" as i originally thought this was the problem. Here is an example of our work on a site that isn't coming up on the analysis report. http://www.electriciansblog.co.uk/2013/10/energy-saving-using-led-lighting/ Thanks0 -
Can't seem to rank for keyword "home care grand rapids" - need some advice
I am trying to rank for "home care grand rapids" and am having a really difficult time. My site: http://healthcareassociates.net has better backlinks, keywords and other seo markers than my competitors but I still can't seem to rank. The keyword and associated keywords (home care grand rapids michigan, home health care grand rapids, etc.) are only 31-33% difficulty and my site/page rank is better than the leading sites. What gives? Todd
Reporting & Analytics | | t1kuslik0 -
301 Redirect 'https'? First post - Newbie.
Good afternoon, Thank you in advance for your help - this is my first post and I am new to all of this. Situation: I've setup 301 redirects for www.thechiplab.com to my new site www.chiplab.com (recently launched e-commerce site on Magento) through cPanel. Problem: Some of my best links are to my old ''https:" www.thechiplab.com secure domain (ex. http://techcrunch.com/2006/12/22/why-doesnt-cafepress-use-flash/) and are not being "passed" on to the new domain. (Open Site Explorer) Is it possible to recover any of the PR from the old secure site? Thanks again, Chase
Reporting & Analytics | | chiplab0