Any ideas why organic traffic seems to have hit a plateau?
-
I run an eCommerce store and have a decent number of quality links pointing to it(which is still growing). It's been 6 months since I started it, and I'm getting between 100-120 organic visits per day right now. I've had a few more quality guest post/infographic links, and I'm also focusing on optimizing individual pages, but my traffic still seems to have plateaued.
I'm beginning to doubt that more links is the answer. All of my content is unique(no manufacturer descriptions) and I'm still being outranked by sites that have spammier link profiles and copy/paste descriptions.
Any thoughts?
-
I don't think you'll see any quick or significant impact linking from your long-tail ranking pages to your individual product (the beauty of the long tail is that you don't need to be so competitive in order to rank) so there's not so much
That's not to say that you shouldn't do it but think about what's best for the visitor.
Consider where the visitor is in the buying cycle and provide content that supports them at the stage/awareness they're at. Do they know what the solution to their problem or need is? Do they understand the benefits of your offerings. Why should they buy from you.
Make sure each of your pages offer an obvious next step. This can be finding out more about your products or is can be a link to buy a particular recommended product.
Don't forget your category pages either. Make sure they have some great unique content too - as well as making it easy for people to find what they're looking for.
Retargeting is a great idea from Christopher, but I'd also say remember the other downloadable assets like buyers guides case-studies, product data sheets (not just the manufacturers produced stuff) - make sure that any such assets are clearly branded, have your website address and active links back to your site.
Again, a lot depends on the kind of products you're selling.
-
You are most welcome my friend. Improving the stickiness, as you said is a bit hard but if we can make it happen, then nothing like it. Let me share a personal experience here. Few years back, I had a client with an e-commerce site. The avg. time spent on the site was around 1 min and few seconds (sorry do not remember exactly). He wanted to improve it. When I saw the product pages, for example, a page related to a coffee making machine, the page had nothing but only the product image, description, features and a button to place an order. We then took some good videos of the product from Youtube and embedded them on to the page. We also added some related products to the right hand side of the page. We did this to all the product pages of the site and the results were very dramatic. The avg. site engagement times jumped to over 3 mins. Then we also had few clients whom we got gamification implemented on the site, small flash games related to the niche and this also got them amazing results. Site engagement time as you know is very important and Google knows who is sticking around and who is leaving once they click through the search results pages and land on a site.
Coming to your blog, I really enjoyed reading it and I would continue visiting it.
Good luck to you my friend.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
-
About 90% of organic traffic is new visitors.
Are you using Retargeting? A significant fraction of the visitors to your site may be interested in a purchase but surfing is easily distracted. Retargeting can be a cost-effective way to get their attention again.
Best,
Christopher -
Hi Devanur,
Thank you for the encouraging words. Sticking out is actually the hardest part! You need to dig a little into your pockets to do that, so you can get impatient at times
PS - thanks for reading the blog and your kind words, it means a lot!
-
Hey Doug,
Thanks for such an in-depth answer. Its interesting that you mention the long tail - a lot of my existing traffic is coming from long tail keywords, but like you said, it's hard to convert those visitors.
One thing I can think of to improve the rankings of individual products is to try and funnel link juice from the high-ranking long tail pages to relevant product pages. Do you think that could help?
About 90% of organic traffic is new visitors.
-
Hi Shabbir
As you've encountered, as you rise up through the rankings it becomes harder and harder to displace those ahead of you.It's a bit like running a marathon starting at the back of the field. You can get to a point where no matter how hard you run, you're never going to catch the guys who started before you.
Ranking for product pages can be insanely tough - even with unique product descriptions...
Brute force link building can only take you so far and increasingly you've got to watch out that your backlink profile isn't going to come back to bite you.
Without knowing what niche you're in it's hard to provide specific advice, but here are some thoughts:
1. You're getting traffic, but how much of these are new visitors and how many are returning visitors? What can you do to get more of those visitors to engage and take action. How can you turn these visitors into loyal returning customers? This can be difficult if you're selling a commodity on price alone.
2. Go broad and think of your long-tail. Instead of focusing on the head-terms that become increasingly difficult to improve, think about growing your long tail by adding content to your site. This can for example, take the form of Frequently asked questions, how-to guides, tips etc or other more creative ideas. It's the richness and depth of thiscontent that'll earn you traffic from queries you would never target individually.
Just remember that these pages still have to work hard to move your visitors towards your site's goal and becoming customers.
Your long tail can deliver more traffic than your head-terms combined. The downside is that the commercial intent may not be as strong for some of this traffic so you'll need to work hard to convert this traffic into customers.
3. Instead of targeting those people who are looking for your products, write content for people who are trying to find answers to the problems that your products solve.
4. Guest blogging just for links doesn't really help you establish your site as an authority and you're missing a trick if your not getting your content in front of your potential customers. Where do your customers hang-out? Can you write guest articles that will attract traffic to your site rather than "just a link". You've got to understand what you're audience is interested in and resist the urge just to tell them what you want to tell them!
Hope this helps,
-
is this a local ecom site? You will definitely face local classified ads, spammy competitors etc and most of the time, they will outrank you. It's just the way local is for those outside the USA side.
The good thing is, most of these competitors just stop spamming and the real clients that eventually find you will be loyal to you. Just continue what you are doing, if possible build a social community as well. Try to get some more local coverage (if you are indeed targeting local) and look at your webmaster tools. See where you need to improve.
Finally, test a PPC campaign. You'll see a whole lot more data vs just waiting for WMT data. You can get ahead earlier and improve your converts.
Good luck Shabbir
-
Hi Shabbir,
Without digging deeper, I would like to say that your website is relatively new and please have a look at your competitors' websites and the time they have been online. You can use archive.org for the purpose. New websites can take time to gain the traction and 6 months is very little that too when you say, its an e-commerce website hence, cut throat competition. Its good that you have been getting 100 -120 organic visits per day. If you continue the way you have been doing, you should be in a good shape soon.
As you know, content that is unique, highly relevant, useful to the visitor and serves the purpose of their visit will do the magic for you. Please don't worry about websites that use low quality or scrapped content ranking at the top. Its not going to work for long (but can greatly depends on the kind of authority they have like DA and PA). In general, search engines have higher tolerance levels for highly authoritative websites.
I would like to conclude by saying, please do not worry as your website is very young and concentrate your efforts to improve the quality of your content, you can try to include some small videos and images (on the product pages) related to the products' functionality, features, USPs etc..improve the stickiness of your website (make your visitors hang out for reasonable amount of time on your site), earn links rather than building them desperately (I am sure, you will never do this as I read your blog). Try to build citations to your site from good websites and you know the rest.
All the best to you.
Devanur Rafi
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
-
Does anyone know if it is possible to get a "dofolow" link from YouTube? All advice currently available seems a bit outdated,
I see that some competitors have links from youtube but i can not see ay advice on how to get do follow links from Youtube - is this possible and if so can anyone advise how? The only advice i can see is a little dated,
Link Building | | SimonButterworth0 -
Is this a good idea for link earning?
Hi, One of our clients provides legal documents online and one of the document is bespoke 'Privacy Policy' for websites. It normally comes with a price as solicitors draft each policy manually. We were thinking to offer this for Free 1 - As a promotion so that we can attract webmasters 2- to earn links that we will ask webmasters to give us a link from their website once they add the text I wanted to get the understanding from you before i go ahead if this is a good a way to gain links or not? I appreciate your input Thank you
Link Building | | Rubix0 -
LInk Building Ideas for Large Site
Hi, I have a very large sized website of about 5 Million Pages. Earlier i used to rank very well with many naturally occurred links, But now, i lost my rankings with numerous Google updates. My content is user generated content and it wont be pure original as my users will post the same on other forums too. I all of my pages rank on #1 page for their keywords. Can anyone suggest me good link building strategy for larger websites as each url will have different keyword, i want all of my urls to be ranked well. Waiting for your replies.
Link Building | | Vegitss0 -
Adding NOFOLLOW to all external links, is this a good idea?
In the setting of a news site, with articles that often link to one or more outside sources, is it a good idea to rel="nofollow" all external links? Would this hurt link-building prospects? Of course, internal links would keep on passing link juice back and forth, but is there real harm in following external links? These would be links our writers and editors created themselves to reputable sources, blogs, etc.
Link Building | | VoxxiVoxxi0 -
Low Traffic, All Branded Keywords
I have a client that is strong locally - and the majority of the (converting) traffic that she gets is through branded keywords. Her traffic is at about ~200 visits a month. She is ranking for some non-branded keywords, but is in a highly competitive niche - gift baskets - and isn't converting for non-branded keywords. The domain authority of the website is at 27, with the homepage authority at 39. Because she is already strong locally I don't necessarily see the need to build local citations for her. What strategies would you suggest to help increase the traffic and conversion of her website? It isn't a new website - the domain was purchased in 2002. I'm just at a loss here in terms of what we can do as an SEO company to help her build an audience - we have already been writing guest posts for publication for her, and she doesn't have the budget for high-cost directories that would really help her authority. We haven't really ventured into conversion rate optimization or multivariate testing - but I feel like what needs to happen right now is the boosting of her traffic overall. What say you all?
Link Building | | MountainMedia0 -
How to track/find new organic backlinks to your domain
I use Google Alerts to track domain-level backlinks (via the link:http://www.example.com trick) but is there a way to track/be alerted of long urls, not just the domain, without having to set an alert for each specific url?
Link Building | | EricPacifico0 -
Brainstorming - Unusual Ideas to get links in the "short term loan" industry
Hello, I would like to hear your strange/unusual/funny ideas for link building campaigns for a website targeted in the short term lending industry. It doesn't matter how easy/complicated it is to apply them, but the more realistic the better. Please don't post anything that was covered in detail somewhere else or something that does not have at least a small/tiny level of realism. An example: Extract the funniest/smart quotations related to money. Create an article where you explain that "even if you are in the short term loan industry" you care about your customers and you want them to educate them so in the future they can avoid getting in a situation when they have very few alternatives.
Link Building | | zoicaremus0 -
UGC content sites not hit by Panda?
I know many social and article sites (hubpages, ezinearticles, many low quality article sites, etc.) were hit by Panda. Many higher quality sites that accept user-submitted content were not hit. High quality blogs that accept guest posts is one example. I believe Squidoo fared pretty well. Any other sites that accept user-generated content (with links) that still rank well?
Link Building | | AdamThompson0