Getting Traffic for an Unranked Phrase
-
Over the last month, 40% of a client's search traffic as resulted from a phrase that they are not even ranking for in the top 100; nor are they popping up on PPC ads for it.
How is this happening? I feel like I am missing something very obvious.
-
Bingo! Thanks Chris I knew it was something that simple.
-
This is it.
-
One case I thought I would mention about one of our clients:
They were getting ~15% of their traffic from a shorttail keyword that they didn't rank for in all the Major SEs. However, as I dug in, I found that they ranked #2 in Google+ Local (but weren't showing in the mixed searches)... that in turn was driving 1000s of impressions and 100+ new visitors per month to their website.
I don't know if your client focuses on local search but if they do then that could be where the hang up is. Google (and Bing Local and Yahoo Local) ranks things completely different in the local SERPs than they do in the General Search... you may find that they are owning keywords that you didn't know they were ranking for.
-
I would suggest to start from Analytics software. Tracking issue is common with third party Analytics software. You need to check client's server logs and data warehouse data as well.
-
Does the client have an image on the site that matches the phrase? If a query pops the image results snippet within organic results, you may see traffic from a term that you rank for within image search, but not organic.
-
I've had it happen with almost every client... albeit, not always at such a high percentage
It's a little hard to help you analyze a problem without knowing the website and phase... I can appreciate that you don't want someone poaching your client... but from my experience Mozzers are respectful about that stuff. Care to share so that we can dig a little deeper and help?
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
-
PDF web traffic hitting our site
Hi there, Over the last few months our traffic has spiked due to irrelevant pdf documents sending us crap traffic, our bounce rate is sky high as well as other metrics. I don't want to just filter out this traffic in GA rather try and stop our site from being attacked. Any advice on a way forward would be great. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ICMPmarketing0 -
Exclude brand Traffic
Hello everyone, Whenever any user searches for our website using brand keywords, session count should comes under direct source instead of Google/organic. Or in simple language, We want that all our brand keyword search traffic should be consider as Direct Traffic instead of organic. Is it possible in Google Analytics? If yes then please share the steps of doing it
Reporting & Analytics | | Obbserv0 -
Filter the Spam traffic
Hello everyone, We have to filter traffic from spam website like webcrawler.com semalt.com social-button.com etc. So we created custom filter with Filter field: referral Filter Pattern: Webcrawler.com|semalt.com|in-g61.mail.yahoo.com|d47c5f40.linkbucks.com|buttons-for-website.com|semalt.semalt.com|forum.topic34157145.darodar.com|social-buttons.com While verification of filter there is error displaying i.e. This filter would not have changed your data. Either the filter configuration is incorrect, or the set of sampled data is too small. Please help in resolving issue..
Reporting & Analytics | | Obbserv0 -
Dip in traffic from Pune for our sites in Google Analytics
Hi, We have noticed dip in traffic from Pune after 6th May'14 in our Google Analytics account for few of our sites. Did anyone noticed the same for your site. Kindly let me know if you have any idea. Thank and Regards
Reporting & Analytics | | vivekrathore0 -
Does anyone know of a way to do a profile level filter to exclude all traffic if it enters the site via certain landing pages?
Does anyone know of a way to do a profile level filter to exclude all traffic if it enters the site via certain landing pages? The problem I have is that we have several pages that are served to visitors of numerous other domains but are also served to visitors of our site. We end up with inflated Google Analytics numbers because people are viewing these pages from our partners' domains but never actually entering our site. I've made an advanced segment that serves the purpose but I'd really like to filter it at the profile level so the numbers across the board are more accurate without having to apply an advanced segment to every report. The advanced segment excludes visits that hit these pages as landing pages but includes visits where people have come from other pages on our domain. I know that you can do profile filters to exclude visits to pages or directories entirely but is there a way to filter them only if they are a landing pages? Any other creative thoughts? Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | ATIseo0 -
We lost great amount of Google Traffic. Need Expert Advice, Please!
We are in the business of selling home and commercial light fixtures for about 10 years now. Our website is a very large ecommerce website with more than 40K pages including category, sub-category and product pages. We have been getting decent organic traffic mostly from highly competitive keywords and also from product/solution specific long tail keywords. Recently when Google changed the EMD algo we have seen a dip in the traffic (say about 60%). I can't be so sure that this is because of EMD update, but it started happening only after this update. There has been a rank drop from 1st page to 2nd page, decrease in no. of keywords driving traffic, decrease in no. of pages driving traffic, all these things have an negative impact on our organic revenue. I know that our back link portfolio is bad and the reason behind this is the SEO companies that we previously worked with, Thanks to them for this sloppy work. Other than back links, Is there anything fundamentally wrong on our website. Here is the URL http://bit.ly/QVFHgr
Reporting & Analytics | | goldenageusa0 -
Strange traffic - panda, penguin? Screenshots attached.
Hi, I'm unsure if I've been hit by penguin/panda. I've attached screenshots below. The first one is April 1st to today. The second is all of April and the 3rd is 1st June to today. The site was offline at the beginning of July which explains no traffic. My traffic took a dip though on April 6th which as I understand it wasn't a panda/penguin roll out? I then got hardly any traffic for May to mid June. Then the site was offline due to a server problem but when it came back on traffic was the highest it has ever been. Today however I am getting zero search engine traffic? I can't figure out what's going on. Can anyone shed any light on the issue? DTJXE DTJXE Dpj21 qHTpj
Reporting & Analytics | | SamCUK0 -
Why does Google Analytics think PPC traffic is organic?
I have a bastard of a problem... Google Analytics is incorrectly tracking PPC traffic as SEO which is screwing up all my reporting . I don't care for rankings, I care for actual SEO traffic and I can't be sure that what i am seeing is correct which is driving me nuts. Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | Red_Mud_Rookie1