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
-
When my new website went live I saw a huge spike in traffic for 3 weeks but then it halved again. Why would this happen?
My new website went live on 13th April and the organic traffic levels increased by 110%, staying at that level for 3 weeks. Then exactly 3 weeks later the organic traffic halved again, going back to the same level as the old site. Has anyone seen this happen before or worked out why?! Thanks Viki P2R76O9
Reporting & Analytics | | TWB0 -
Self-Reffering Traffic After upgrading to Universal Analytics
Backstory: We have always had an issue with self-referring traffic but in waiting for the UA upgrade we put it on the backburner for getting fixed. We have now upgraded to UA and I was under the impression that GA would automatically exclude the domain associated with a property as a referral source. However this is not what I am seeing under my referral traffic source. With 10 websites having issues with this I need some help. Should I use the referral exclusion list? Also on a handful of our sites we have region specific URLs, I am also seeing these come in as self-referring traffic. I should also mention that about 85% of our sales are being attributed to the self-referring traffic. Here are two sites for example sake: ZootSports.com and K2snowboarding.com
Reporting & Analytics | | K2_Sports0 -
More Traffic From Lower Rankings?
I have access to analytics for two different sites that rank for the same keyword. Strangely, the site that ranks on page 3 gets three times as much traffic as the site that ranks on page 1 (rankings according to multiple SEO tools as well as my own browser). How is this possible?
Reporting & Analytics | | JABacchetta0 -
Rank #1 for a 110,000/month query search, but barely any traffic?
Hi guys, As it says in the title, we've recently reached the absolute #1 position for a certain key phrase in the travel industry which the Google Keyword Tool tells me averages 110,000 local (165,000 global) searches a month... however we have received barely any traffic at all over the past TWO months for it and I'm trying my best to determine why. We've checked on multiple different devices with all forms of personalisation off, different browsers, 3G connections as opposed to office Wi-FI etc. and it still returns us as the #1 rank. Meta descriptions and title tags are pretty much pristine if I don't say so myself, however what should be a very lucrative key phrase is currently returning little to no traffic results. Has anyone had experience in a similar situation to this? Any possible causes that I might be missing? Would greatly appreciate any help. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | ExperienceOz0 -
Images Getting Indexed Making for Low Engagements Times in GA
I have quite a few images that are being indexed for popular search terms and are getting clicks. This site has a 0-10 second engagement of 69%. I would like to eliminate these images from the equation because I tend to think they are hurting my "quality score" in organic Google rankings. How do you keep these images from ranking? I suppose I could rename them. Should I disallow the images folder? I hate to do that, because some of my images turn up in local searches, which is good. I would rather keep those. But what is best practice? A little background info, this is a local service site. So the images that are ranking are coming up for a broad national type search. This has 0 value for the site. Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated, Thanks! Kathy
Reporting & Analytics | | MSWD0 -
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 -
Get Stats on Search Box Usage, Using Google Analytics?
Let me preface this by first saying I am NOT using the Google Adsense Search feature. The question I am asking is pertaining to the standard search box that comes already coded in most .php blogs. In the Google Analytics, is there a way to tell how many people are searching using the search box? I've looked through the navigation and pathway options in analytics and I don't seem to see anything that definitively points to the number of people using the search box but, perhaps, I am overlooking it. Any insight?
Reporting & Analytics | | ChristineCadena0
