Traffic from organic grew significantly. But why?
-
Hello,
In our e-commerce business we saw significant growth in organic traffic during the summer months.
This is a period we sell a lot of custom made photobooks. The weird thing is that we didn't do any changes to our photobook pages since 2013, where we didn't have these peaks.
So this is good news, but...What would be a good way to start investigating the reason of this increase?
I have a hard time answering the 'why' question.Thank you very much for your help!
With kind regards,
Yannick
-
Hi Evelien,
Does organic traffic appear to be attributable to any particular country or countries? This may sound strange, but I wonder if a competitor pulled out of the market. It appears just about every competitor you have in google.be got a pretty nice organic increase around that time, which has continued. Kruidvat seems to have the lion's share now.
Last I knew, Luxembourg was something of a tax shelter. With the recent changes in VAT, I wonder if a significant competitor or competitors found it difficult to continue operations. But that's just a 'shot in the dark' on my part.
-
If you have Google Analytics (or similar) take a look at where the traffic is coming from and compare it to any historical data if you have it.
It could be something happened online like better rankings or a buzz about you on social media as Don said a link in a forum or it could be something offline like a newspaper or magazine article on you or even a mention on TV. Check referrers in Analytics.
If you have been at any trade shows that could also have driven traffic. Check 'city' report in Analytics.
If it's possible you may also be able to implement a 'where did you hear about us' question at some point - either when people come to buy something or as an after sales thing. That would help for future.
All good news for you though as you said but it's better to know why it happened so you can do more of it.
Hope that helps
-
Hi Yannick,
Sounds like you got mentioned on a few post. Perhaps a DIY blog or the like. These tend to drive traffic fairly well. Check your back link profile and see if you noticed any new sites popping up. A few months ago customer service said "what is up with all these new teflon o-rings sales lately", I did the research and it turns out we were mentioned on two forums with links to our teflon o-ring section.
Hope this helps,
Don
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 traffic for branded searches help a site rank for general terms?
A year or two ago we put up some websites which were specific to brands we own. Sure enough those sites (eg 'myBrand.com') started to rank pretty well for those brand terms eg 'mybrand curling tongs' (it's not curling tongs, btw, but you get the idea). We were getting a decent amount of traffic presumably from people who have bought or seen these products on our amazon/ebay stores. Before long, we see us starting to rank well for non branded searches eg 'curling tongs' even among decent competition. Next thing you know I'm getting told by the boss that we need to put up websites for all specific ranges, not just brands, because specificity is a bonus for ranking well. While there's probably a point that a site for MybrandCurlingTongs lends itself well to ranking for curling tongs, is there also an element that the branded searches we got (via making our brand known on amazon/ebay) helped the site gain recognition and authority? As such a new website about 'ionising hair dryers' would not rank well based on being specific, because it wouldn't be helped by a lot of branded traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HSDOnline2 -
Organic search traffic is dropping since September
We own a large wiki site which allows people to make articles about their business and other things that Wikipedia would prohibit. To make our site more rich and expand the pages people can link to on their pages, we scraped between 1-2 million pages from the english wikipedia, pages such as “Los Angeles, CA” and “United States” etc. We’ve been getting a steady supply of organic backlinks from users who create their own pages and cite their wikis on their website, in news etc. However, starting 2 months ago our organic traffic has started slowly decaying as if we have received some kind of algorithmic penalty. What could it be? Could it be dupe content from the wikipedia pages we imported and indexed? Could it be some kind of algo from the Penguin update? We are just very confused why our organic search traffic would begin to drop at all since every day we have organic users making quality pages, some of whom organically backlink their articles on their own website and these obviously add up over time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teddef1 -
Website Not Ranking Organically - Not Links, Not Domain Authority...
This is regarding the domain: http://lesliekays.com We got a new client about 5 months back who had a website that was hacked. It took several months, but we've cleaned up most of the spammy links and completely rebuilt their website. We have been successful with every other client that we have ever done getting our customers to rank well organically, but we just can't figure this one out. I'm willing to offer a REWARD to the single person who can figure this out for us. (Let's not get carried away, a small reward). This customer has great quality links to their site too. We are looking for answers other than: 1. Backlinks 2. Content 3. Malware 4. Domain or Page authority 5. 404 errors 6. We have utilized Googles Webmaster tools endlessly It is something else and we can not identify it! Let me know what you think! I will give a public shout out to the person who helps us identify this issue!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tosten0 -
Organic Listings showing Google Tag Manager + Google Page Title...?
I'm a bit stumped with this. I optimise all my titles etc for Australia - and now the organic liatings are showing something strange. For example ( we sell health supplements ) Meta title = "My Product , Buy Online Australia" If I type "My Product" - the title in the organic listings says "My Product - My Company Limited" - and the only place I can see it getting that from is a combination of Meta Data used in Google Tag Manager + the Name on my Google places page. This is much more obvious for categories.. but it's a pain in the butt. If I type "My Product Australia" Then the original "My Product , Buy Online Australia" comes up. Any ideas on policy etc? I have taken the "Limited" off the Google business page - so hopefully this will change over time - but I can't find any information on why google would do something like this. If you had shed any light on this - would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Unexplained Drop In Ranking and Traffic-HELP!
I operate a real estate web site in New York City (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). It was hit by Penguin in April 2012, with search volume falling from 6,800 per month in March 2012 to 3,300 by June 2012. After refreshing content and changing the theme, volume recovered to 4,300 per month in October 2013. There was a big improvement in early October 2013, perhaps tied to a Panda update. In November 2013 I hired an SEO company. They are reputable; on MOZ's recommended list. After following all their suggestions (searching and removing duplicate content, disavowing toxic links, improving the site structure to make it easier for Google to index listings, re-writing ten key landing pages, improving the design of the user interface) ranking and traffic started to decline in April of 2014 and crashed in June 2014 after an upgraded design with improved user interface was launched. Search volume is went from 4700 in March to around 3800 in June. However ranking on the keywords that generate conversions has really declined, and clicks from those terms are down at least 65%. My online business is severely compromised after I have spent almost double the anticipated budget to improve ranking and conversion. A few questions: 1. Could a drop in the number of domains lining to our site have led to this decline? About 30 domains that had toxic links to us agreed to remove them. We had another 70 domains disavowed in late April. We only have 78 domains pointing to our domain now, far less than before (see attached AHREFs image). It seems there is a correlation in the timeline between the number of domains pointing to us and ranking performance. The number of domains pointing to us has never been this low. Could this be causing the drop? My SEO firm believes that the quality of these links are very low and the fact that many are gone is in fact a plus. 2. The number of indexed pages has jumped to 851 from 675 in early June (see attached image from Google Webmaster tools), right after a site upgrade. The number of pages in the site map is around 650. Could the indexation of the extra 175 page somehow have diluted the quality of the site in Google's eyes? We have filed removal request for these pages in Mid June and again last week with Google but they still appear. In 2013 we also launched an upgrade and Google indexed an extra 500 pages (canonical tags were not set up correctly) and search volume and ranking collapsed. Oddly enough when the number of pages indexed by Google fell, ranking improved. I wonder if something similar has occurred. 3. May 2014 Panda update. Many of our URLs are product URLs of listings. They have less than 100 words. Could Google suddenly be penalizing us for that? It is very difficult to write descriptions of hundreds of words for products that change quickly. I would think the Google takes this into account. If someone could present some insight into this issue I would be very, very grateful. I have spent over $25,000 on SEO reports, wireframe design and coding and now find myself in a worse position than when I started. My SEO provider is now requesting that I purchase even more reports for several thousand dollars and I can't afford it, nor can I justify it after such poor results. I wish they would take it upon themselves to identify what went wrong. In any case, if anyone has any suggestions I would really appreciate it. I am very suspicious that this drop started in earnest at the time of link removal and the disavow and accelerated at the time of the launch of the upgrade. Thanks, Alan XjSCiIdAwWgU2ps e5DerSo tYqemUO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Schema.org Organization Logo markup
Hi Guys, Does anyone have an example of a site using schema.org Organization logo markup (as per: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/using-schemaorg-markup-for-organization.html), with the logo appearing in Google SERPs? One of the designers is pressing me ofr an example. I've found plenty of brands getting their logo in the SERPs knoweldge base results, but they have all been using G+ verified company profiles, or other methods (Googs simply selecting a best fit?) to achieve it. Thx!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David_ODonnell0 -
Are sites that recently lost traffic considered bad neighborhood?
Hi, While searching for co-operations and guest blogging opportunities I found several sites that look legit and that lost all SE traffic (according to various tools such as SEMRush). By legit I mean sites that have PR3 and up. Have many solid looking articles and that the articles are on the site's subject and that the articles do not necessarily point to other sites with exact match anchors. Should I post in these sites or are they probably penalized and therefore being there put me at risk? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Search result clicks for one of my posts down significantly
I started receiving a warning warning in google webmaster tools about 2 weeks ago that said "big traffic change for top url". On reading the message i saw "Search results clicks for http://goo.gl/EyhUJ have decreased significantly". When I search google using the keyword "sore breasts" for which that post used to rank at least number 2 on google, I dont see anything. The related post http://goo.gl/vP025 is still ranking well. Can anyone give me an idea of what might have happened? I am totally at sea. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adaeze0