SEO direction - help needed
-
Hi,
I've been working on a site for about 5 years. We built the traffic up to about 8k visitors/day.
Although now it's dropped down over the past 2 years to about 2k visitors a day.
New traffic source is mainly from SEO longtail.
The whole time we have been working to improve the site.
What's the best way to get some help from experts on the right direction to get traffic back up or to at least tell me the site will never work
Thanks in advance.
M
-
Thanks Matt, Joey, Joseph and Keszi for your feedback.
I will investigate and see what I can come up with.
I will update any progress.
Cheers
M
-
Hi Mark,
The guys have mentioned quite good answers above, so I am not going to elaborate on that.
I just wanted to jump in with a tool for the algorithm diagnosis: http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
It helped me a lot to see which update has hit one of the sites I have been working on.
I hope it will help you as much, as did with me.
Gr., Keszi
-
Good advice Matt,
Mark, look at your traffic over the time period i question. Then pull up Moz's list of algorithm updates ( http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change ) See if your substantial drop in traffic correlates to any of the updates to help determine if you got a specific penalty problem. This could be an eye opener to discover what could be a bigger potential problem than you initially thought or never knew about at all.
If the traffic drop was slowly over time, I would also check your keyword rankings over time. It may be as simple as more and more of your competitors are catching up on the seo work . Slowly out ranking you and getting a big share of your previous traffic.
I would definitely check the algorithms in relation to the traffic drops.
Hope that helps,
Joe
-
What was the quality of the traffic you used to have? Were you getting good conversion?
Matt's comments are great. I'd also add that with the info you shared (mainly the timing), your traffic was possibly from rankings propped up by bad links? I'd do a thorough link audit if you haven't already, and simultaneously start brainstorming some great user-focused content that targets those short tail keywords with volume. If you feel the need to hire an expert, the Moz Recommended list is a great place to go. http://moz.com/community/recommended
Whoa! When did that list get so big??
-
Hey Mark,
It's hard to say with the info you've provided but were you hit with one of the many Google algorithm updates that tanked your traffic at once or did it slowly just go away? What were you doing differently then? I know a lot of small businesses that were blogging like mad for a long time then stopped and shockingly, traffic dropped as their content activities stopped. When they resumed, readership didn't immediately pick back up so they got frustrated & stopped again. All that on again, off again, on again is definitely not going to help.
If you were affected with some sort of Google zoo animal, you'll probably want to get professional help getting it sorted. 6000 traffic lost is just SO much. If you need anything further, please do let me know!
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
-
Need some help understanding SEO - Please help before I lose [pull out] all my hair
I'm new to SEO, and am stubbornly trying to educate myself. I have a telescope shop in Canada, it's a small business that we run on the side. We're driving lots of traffic through FB and our outreach programs but I really want to increase our presence on search. We released a new website back in January and it killed some of our rankings. We're working our way back with a very specific set of efforts on regular SEO: Metadata and titles, although it seems that's not super relevant Building high quality backlinks and eliminating any spammy backlinks Rewriting product listings so that they are original content though I'm not sure how important this is in e-commerce Writing high quality articles and blog posts Working relevant keywords into our product pages and titles I understand that good SEO is about pushing on all the levers, and trying to make sure that your site is as valuable to the end user as possible. We're making some good progress, but I'm puzzled by the #1 shop in Canada. They don't put any apparent effort into SEO and they still rank #1 on every key product we compete with them on. I've worked with two separate, highly ranked and regarded SEO firms on this and neither has been able to tell my why this other site ranks so highly. Here's a specific example on a popular product that we both sell, the Celestron NexStar 8SE. Here’s the link to Telescope Canada’s page for their Celestron 8SE: https://telescopescanada.ca/products/celestron-nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope-11069 Here’s a link to the Celestron 8SE page from the manufacturer website: https://www.celestron.com/products/nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope Telescopes Canada has just copied and pasted. There is no original content aside from adding the shipping and return policy to the tab, and having some options for selecting accessories on the page. Here is our page: https://all-startelescope.com/products/celestron-nexstar-8se We have higher page authority, higher domain authority, and they keyword analyzer in moz says that our page is higher quality than the Telescopes Canada page. I can’t find a single metric on any tool (ubbersuggest, Moz, ahrefs, semrush) that says Telescopes Canada is a better site, or has a better NexStar 8SE product page. But they keep ranking ahead of us, and right at the top of google search. Our titles are good, our metadata is good (but I don’t think that’s been a serious ranking factor for about ten years). Our text is original, it’s relevant, we have healthy internal links to the page. According to Moz's page ranker it's 20 points higher than Telescope Canada's page. We have invensted in some excellent blog content, we’re adding new products to the website so that we rank for more keywords. All of those things are helping, but I fundamentally don’t understand why Telescopes Canada is #1 almost across the board on every key product in our market. There is something that I’m not seeing here. Can you see any metric, any tool in your toolbox that indicates why they rank at the top, or even higher than we do for in these search terms specific to that product: Celestron NexStar 8SE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nkennett
NexStar 8SE
Celestron NexStar 8SE Canada
NexStar 8SE Canada I have a feeling it's something technical that I'm missing, but I'm not sure how obvious it is with two 'professional' firms not finding it. I'd really appreciate any help or insight that you can offer.0 -
Looking for an SEO Mentor
I do in-house marketing for a medium sized luxury architectural design firm. I have a good understanding of the moz platform and general SEO but would like to findsomeone to provide regular guidance and answer some specific questions regarding our SEO. Specifically, we want advising on keywords, blog content, and link building. Ideally we'd like to engage a consultant (remotely) on an hourly basis. We'v have had very poor experiences with big SEO firms so that’s definitely not something we’re looking for. Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WorkshopAPD
Caio0 -
Need help in de-indexing URL parameters in my website.
Hi, Need some help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ImranZafar
So this is my website _https://www.memeraki.com/ _
If you hover over any of the products, there's a quick view option..that opens up a popup window of that product
That popup is triggered by this URL. _https://www.memeraki.com/products/never-alone?view=quick _
In the URL you can see the parameters "view=quick" which is infact responsible for the pop-up. The problem is that the google and even your Moz crawler is picking up this URL as a separate webpage, hence, resulting in crawl issues, like missing tags.
I've already used the webmaster tools to block the "view" parameter URLs in my website from indexing but it's not fixing the issue
Can someone please provide some insights as to how I can fix this?0 -
Splitting a strong page - SEO
Hi, I have a page with high traffic that is showing a list of flea markets in a unique URL. We are redesigning our website and we have created a listing directory of flea markets, so the users can look up and find the information for each. Each flea market will have its own URL in the future, and the listing directory shows only summarized info of each flea market in the results. Before activating the new flea market section, I would like to make sure which is our best bet: Option 1: Create pages with same URL/content as the current ones, which we won't link from frontend, and besides that, use the new flea market section on a separate page. Option 2: Redirect the current page to the new flea market section. As an inaccurate reference because it depends on many variables and SEO doesn't have an actual number, I understand this is more or less how it would work: Example Option 1 (after 1 week of launch): Old Flea Market Pages SEO traffic: 10,000 visits/month New Copied Flea Market Pages traffic: 9,700 (maybe a bit below 100 because of design changes etc) New Flea Market Section traffic: 500 visits/month (then increase over time) Example Option 2 (after 1 week of launch): Old Flea Market Pages SEO traffic: 10,000 visits/month New Redirected Flea Market Pages traffic: 9,000 (in principle PageRank wouldn't be affected, but other rankings might) New Flea Market Section traffic: (joined above, then increase over time) According to this, Option 1 would give us more total future visits compared to redirecting, plus the new flea market pages would add to it. If redirecting, the new flea market section would add up some SEO juice to the old page, but not as much as Option 1 (not redirecting). Please confirm. Which option is the best one and why? Thank you, New 301 Redirection Rules: https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading10 -
What next to help with my rankings
I'm after a fresh set of eyes and any suggestions to help me with my site on what next I should be doing to help increase rankings. The site is: http://bit.ly/VR6xIm Currently the site is ranking around 9-11th on google.co.uk for it's main term which is the name of the site. The site is around a year old, when it launched it went initially up towards positions 3-5 but has since settled at around where it is now. I have a free tool webmasters can use to implement our speed test into their sites which also includes a link back to our site in it to recognise that we are providing the tool for free, I periodically change the link achor text so it is not always the same anchor text that every site uses. Is there anything obvious I should be doing or that is missing that would help with my rankings? *Just as a note, I am not after a review on the actual speed test on the site, a new one will be developed to help further increase accuracy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wardy0 -
Redirection - Seo trick?
Hi, After analyzing the site I found several Redirections of exact match domains. With different domain name extensions. Is Seo trick? Is the second website which i fond that is using this technique. Can anyone gives more details? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Advice on further SEO
I am frustrated by a lack of progress for a major keyword I want to rank for. I have made several pages, optimized with Onpage and even a whole site but I can't seem to get my ratings up. I am hoping somone can take a look at my pages and efforts and offer me some advice... Keyword is "National Currency" One site is devoted to this keyword: NationalCurrencyValues This site is ranked 30th and is down 9... and this page on another site is devoted to the same keyword ranked 26th is: http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/National-Currency.aspx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Am I Doing This Wrong? Ecommerce SEO
I ran my site through the SEOMoz On-Page Optimization tool and one of the problems noted was "Keyword Self-Cannibalization" in this case, it was stating I was using the keyword "Board Games" too much. Site in question: http://theboardgamers.co.uk/ The problem being is that every product link contains the word "Board Game" - Which makes sense, but I guess it may look spammy to the SEO world. Would it be best to remove the "board game" part from each internal link and only leave it in the URL structure?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | REMOVE560