Why does the site I am working on have so few visits from organic search results?
-
Hello!
I am not very experienced with SEO, but I am trying to help out on a site that has been around since 2010 and has well over a thousand pages of high-quality, original content, with more being added all the time. Only around 65 of the site's daily visits come from organic search results; this seems very low. There has already been significant SEO work done on the site. Is there something about the site that strikes anyone as obviously getting in the way of organic traffic? The URL is ellenjovin.com.
I would appreciate any thoughts you may have.
Thank you very much!
-
Hi there,
I think it's definitely important to first determine which keywords / searches / niches you think the site should be getting visits from, rather than wondering why the initial number is so low. You will need to consider what people could be searching for that the site could potentially rank well for. If the primary purpose of the website is to source work or speaking gigs, what do people looking for Ellen's services search for?
Is there significant search interest around her work from people simply looking to read? If so, what do they search for in the linguistics / grammar niches that the site should show up for but doesn't? With 25 linking root domains as shown by Open Site Explorer, is this much lower than the sites currently ranking for her primary search terms, or is it about right? Do those links go just to the home page, or to pages that should feasibly rank for the terms key to her audience?
I hope this gives you somewhere to start from - I would say that 65 organic search visits per day is fine for some blogs, but is low if there is significant search engine users interest in a topic. Start with the Google Adwords keyword research tool to look into the volumes around Ellen's subjects and see if you can pick out a good list that she should rank for. Then take a look at how the site could be better optimised, or how your off-page / PR / link building work could be better to drive traffic / rankings to those pages.
-
I only took a quick look at a few pages, but it appears a little thin. There's not much content on each page.
Also I couldn't tell what the purpose or the focus was. Is it meant to be a resource where people for reviews of language-learning programs? If so, there is not much depth to the reviews so they are unlikely to rank well. Or is it meant to be a record of one person's quest to learn lots of languages? If so, I wouldn't expect much organic traffic because few would search for such a topic to read about.
Suggestions: If the focus is reviews - get some more in-depth content there. Leave the blog pages day-to-day musings. Also do add meta-descriptions to the blog pages.
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
-
My sites are not mooving why?
i have three local sites in Dubai. my second site is on page three. i didn't go for any guest post yet but for a long time with all improvement, It didn't move a bit. unable to understand the adhesivity of page three. lol any suggestion site 1- https://www.desertsafaritour.ae site 2- https://www.arabiannightsafari.com site3- https://www.uaedesertsafari.com any expert suggestion or any guideline by moz expert www.desertsafaritour.ae
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | faisalkiani0 -
Why does some sites rank with no seo
Why is it that some site rank with zero efforts? I have been working on some seo for a while on my main site and i have been getting more info competition analysis with sem and moz. Looking at the states from this website which tends to popup often in the searches on page 1-2 before my site. This site is not keyword optimized, meaning they arent even trying to rank.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CooperStrzelecki
There is no content, articles etc.,
6 backlinks (nothing powerful just 2 directory links and 2 from developer)
Site really isnt even designed to get traffic as its a trade only ecommerce website
I doubt they are hiding anything as far as backlinks etc. as it will get them too many visitors they dont want
The city i am searching isnt even on the page (it is a city within a city so maybe google still relates it)
PA 24 DA 15 Now my site:
Optimized reasearched keywords
175 backlinks
All my main pages have content with images, alt tags, internal linking
full of content, blogs, videos, products (probably 4000, could a site being too big be an issue?)
Site gets regular updates
I probably have 200 citations
All the social media which gets done often
PA 32 DA 20 They do get a good bit of traffic but that is probably the only thing i would see but it would be direct traffic mostly i believe as it would be people going to order regularly since it is a print reseller. They may have some age on me 15 vs 8 years. Could it be some kind of penalty i am not sure about lingering? According to what i know to check everyything looks ok, no shady links accoding to sem. I am working more and more on all the pages but this competittion site really doesnt have crap going on probably 8 pages and 1 page does all the ordering. What the hell does google want from me exactly!0 -
301 redirect to search results page?
Hi - we just launched our redesigned website. On the previous site, we had multiple .html pages that contained links to supporting pdf documentation. On this new site, we no longer have those .html landing pages containing the links. The question came up, should we do a search on our site to gather a single link that contains all pdf links from the previous site, and set up a redirect? It's my understanding that you wouldn't want google to index a search results page on your website. Example: old site had the link http://www.oldsite.com/technical-documents.html new site, to see those same links would be like: http://www.newsite.com/resources/search?View+Results=&f[]=categories%3A196
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Site experiencing drop in Google rankings and organic traffic after redesign.
Hello, The company that I work for recently implemented a complete redesign for our company website. The former site was old, cumbersome and in desperate need of an update. We streamlined the site structure and made sure to redirect as many pages as we could find to new thematically related pages with 301 redirects. After the launch of our new site we saw a large upswing in "soft" 404 errors despite the fact that most of these pages do redirect upon inspection. So in relation to the soft 404s, for example, is it merely a matter of labeling them as fixed if they redirect properly, or could their be an underling issue with the site itself? Also, a majority or the urls labeled "not found" in webmaster tools are properly redirected. Do these merely need to be marked as fixed, or is there something else that needs to be fixed like the sitemap structure? I appreciate any and all input. Beyond Indigo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeyondIndigo1 -
"No index" page still shows in search results and paginated pages shows page 2 in results
I have "no index, follow" on some pages, which I set 2 weeks ago. Today I see one of these pages showing in Google Search Results. I am using rel=next prev on pages, yet Page 2 of a string of pages showed up in results before Page 1. What could be the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Site Navigation
Hi Mozzers, I am an SEO at uncommongoods.com and looking for your opinion on our site nav. Currently our nav & URLs are structured in 3 levels. From the top level down, they are: 1. Category ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden 2. Subcat ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath 3. Family ex:http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath/bath-accessories Right now, all levels are accessible from our top nav but we are considering removing the family pages. If we did that, Google could still find & crawl links to the family pages, but they would have to drill down to the subcat pages to find them. Do you guys think this would help or hurt our SEO efforts? Thanks! -Zack
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | znotes0 -
Places Listing in Search Results
Hi everyone, We have a company that hired us to set-up their Google Places listing for their 2nd location. The listing for the 1st location is very strong. Lots of reviews, Zagat rating, Knowledge graph, etc. In the search results the Google Places listing for the 1st location has merged with the website listing. You can see the link to the main site w/ a small grey google places listing directly below it. The client would like BOTH Google places listing to show up in the search results. They both show up on the map listing but not in the search results. Each location has its own listing in Google Places. We have also created different pages on the website for each location. Is there a way to get the search results to display places listings? I have noticed a few other business have done it by naming each of their multiple locations something slightly different. Then the search results seem to realize there are multiple locations and display the places listing in the search results. Anyone run into this? Any ideas? Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeattleJoe0 -
How to optimise for search results which are affected by Query Deserves Freshness?
I am looking to rank a clients site for certain keywords which have a huge exact local search volume in the 200,000 region. Many of these keywords are celebrity names like Victoria Beckham, Pippa Middleton. etc. 9 times out of 10 these people are in the news and the first page is taken up by new article/news results. My client is a large media publishing company so their site is very relevant. Does anyone know how to optimise for getting on the first page with these types of queries? Thanks Barry
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HaymarketMediaGroupLtd0