Decline in Traffic
-
Our company is a full service law firm with a main website and 6 microsites relevant to each practise area. Over the last 2 years, we have had significant traffic growth and ranked well in SERP, conversions were good and everything was tracking along nicely. Come January 2019, the traffic on 2 of our microsites have dropped by 20% and is not recovering. We have done a site audit and there are no issues with the website, we are still ranking #1 in SERP for our targeted search terms but the traffic just isn't there.
Has anyone else with legal websites had this issue or can provide insight into the drop in traffic? It just doesn't make sense why all of a sudden the traffic isn't there anymore. Any advice on what other actions we can take to try and find the issue would be appreciated.
-
I manage an information-based website, and recently, I've seen a decline in organic traffic for certain key articles despite consistently updating and enhancing the content. I've ensured proper on-page SEO practices, but the rankings seem to be fluctuating. Any advice or strategies specific to informational websites for identifying and addressing these ranking fluctuations and improving overall organic traffic?
-
Wouldn't that mean our ranking would have been affected as well? Our ranking hasn't changed for our target search terms and keywords. I even do a keyword analysis each month to determine whether no search terms or keywords are being searched in higher volumes and that hasn't happened.
It would make sense that a competitor took our traffic if they made changes to their site, but wouldn't that also mean they would have taken our ranking in SERPs?
-
Having looked at Moz's list of Google updates close to the date of the decline in your site's traffic - November 29 was the nearest one.
However, this doesn't explain the failure to recover the organic traffic, which in my experience of providing SEO for law indicates one of 2 things:
- Changes you made to your website caused the decline
- Changes a competitor made to their site took your traffic
-
The decline started in December 2018. A seasonal drop in December is expected, but it never bounced back after that like it did in previous years. The first quarter of 2019, organic traffic has consistently been down 10-15% compared to last year. April was down 33% and this month we are down 20%.
-
Hello,
Have you noticed when the drop started in Google Analytics? It may coincide with an algorithm update.
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 Search Console data include GMB traffic? Branded CTR is 37.8%- Good or Bad?
Hey all, Per Search Console our branded keyword CTR is 37.8%. But when that keyword is searched our GMB listing shows up on top of the #1 result. For the same 90 day period GMB shows another 35% visits to our GMB (based on the number of impressions and visits to our GMB page) listing when the same keyword is searched. My question is this. Does Search console data include clicks that came from our GMB listing or not? My thinking is like this: If GMB traffic is not calculated in search console then it means that 72.8% of people looking for our brand will end up on our site on way or another 9organic #1 result plus GMB listing visits) We are also doing PPC for this very keyword that has gets almost 20% of the remaining traffic. So after adding all up we are loosing about 8% of our branded traffic to people who are doing adwords. When you search our brand you normally see 2, 3 competitor's adwords ads. Does anyone know how this works exactly? And if you don't mind sharing your branded keyword CTR's, so I can compare to ours please. I would love to compare to a site that actually has a GMB listing ranking for the same keyword Thanks in advance, Davit
Reporting & Analytics | | Davit19850 -
Whats (Other) traffic in Google Analytics?
When I look through all our clients, a few are receiving the majority of their traffic from (other). [ Acquisition > Channels > (Other) ]. The only option in (other) is "website" or "offline", whatever that may be. And even weirder, the avg session duration is 0:00. Any idea what this may be?
Reporting & Analytics | | W2GITeam0 -
60% of Direct traffic is actually Organic
For some pre-reading, Groupon experimented with deindexing part of their site back in 2014 and found that they had a big drop in direct traffic: http://searchengineland.com/60-direct-traffic-actually-seo-195415 Recently I've conducted a similar test on a very large site and have found that Direct dropped somewhere between 50-80% for the pages deindexed, depending on the day (It has been running for ~4 days). Has anyone else tried this experiment before? If so what were your results?
Reporting & Analytics | | Leads.Bz
What I'm most interested in now is to find out why this traffic is classed as Direct - there appears to be no reason why the site or server would interfere, so I can only imagine that Google is sending traffic without referrer data. Does anyone have any thoughts as to why they would do that?0 -
Traffic drop after analytics troubles
Hi For two weeks we had an artifical low bouncerate & high pageviews/visit in our Analytics reporting. The day we corrected the bug in Analytics - our bouncerate & pageviews/visit returned to normal levels - however we saw our search traffic go down massively(-50% in sessions). The bug in the Analytics was caused by a second Analytics tag which was included in an external script which interfered with our own tag. The drop in traffic occurred just after the removal of the second script (which was only on our site for two weeks). We didn't touch our own tagging - and there were no technical changes on the site during this period, and there is no seasonal trend which could explain the sudden drop of traffic. We double checked our tagging - and the analytics tag is present & working on all the pages of our site. On the organic traffic report from analytics you can clearly see the when the troubles with analytics started & ended (artificial low bounce rate) - and that the traffic drop starts right after the reporting issue ended. Webmastertools also indicated a lower number of views/clicks, but not to the massive 50% drop. Is it possible that Google uses the measurements from Analytics for it's SERP's? Or should there be another reason, and where should we start looking? Appreciate your help! e5GmoMM
Reporting & Analytics | | DirkC0 -
March 1st Decline in Visits and Pageviews
This site was upgraded from Joomla 1 to Joomla 3 and launched on Feb 27th. The SEF structure has not changed. The extension sh404sef tracks the 404s and there are only a few dozen from mistyped urls, so I have to assume the historical ranking has not been affected. How can I figure out why there is such a decline on March 1st from 4400 to 1500 visits? Is it coincidence after the new launch or did something happen with google on March 1st? http://transitionconsultants.com Screenshot%202014-04-11%2009.47.05.png
Reporting & Analytics | | modernmagic0 -
Campaign shows no traffic from Analytics
My campaaigns are connected to GA but traffic is zero for all campaigns
Reporting & Analytics | | berndheyer0 -
SEO traffic had significantly dropped
I know this question has been asked before, but I'm hoping someone can address my specific issue. We recently did a complete redesign of our site and moved it over to a new server. The site was even "down" for about a week, where we had a static splash page. However since relaunching (it's not been over two weeks) we've seen a significant drop in search engine traffic. We are using Yoast for Wordpress. The site is The Tech Block. Could anyone see if there is something we're doing wrong? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ttb0 -
Whats the best way to separate Google Shopping from regular organic traffic in analytics?
whats the best way to separate Google Shopping from regular organic traffic in analytics?
Reporting & Analytics | | DavidKonigsberg0