Sudden drop in traffic in April and stagnant since then
-
Hi, I am the editor at a travel website based in Singapore (www.tripzilla.com). In mid April, we suffered a drop out of the blue and in total, it was a 20% drop overall. We post about 2-3 new articles a day, and we do research our keywords. I have also been updating our older ranking articles but seems like it's not really working. In May, we only received a .50% growth
I have to bring it back to speed, and I really dont understand the decline, since the "formula" of our postings has been the same since I joined the company a year ago.
Please help thank you!
-
Hi there,
Others have already mentioned great starting points. The steps I would take here in order would look something like:
- Confirm that I'm looking at the right data, and identify where the drop is coming from. Is it mostly the blog? A certain section? Top performing pages? Homepage? Or is it more of an all around drop to most pages?
- Once you answer the first question, it will allow you to prioritize where to look. If you identify most of the drop happened on your blog for example, you can focus your attention there to answer questions like, "Have we changed anything on the blog recently from a technical perspective?", "Are we confident there is nothing that is stopping us from ranking technically?", etc.
- The more difficult situation is when there is a general decrease in traffic to most pages on the site (doesn't seem to be a rhyme or a reason). In these cases I would look back at what updates have affected the site before to see a trend. When did the drop happen? Does that drop line up with a recent update? If so, what was that update about? Then some form of a technical audit, content audit, etc would be reasonable next steps to essentially identify the biggest issues in each.
Some other points in no particular order
- Remember that more content/pages does not necessarily mean more traffic. Because your formula was working a year ago doesn't mean it will work now (or work as well).
- Looking at your site briefly, you have a good amount of content (~17,000 pages) but it's difficult to navigate and find articles. If I had to guess, I'd say the site could benefit from a re-design and content overhaul/audit to ensure there are not too many overlapping pages and that they are easily discoverable by users (and crawlers).
I know that's a bit of a brain dump but hope that (along with other response) helps point you to a starting point!
-
Hi, really hope to get feedback from the experts here
-
Hi! Thanks for the replies.
As far as I'm concerned there has been no major site changes. In fact, I even ramped up my keyword planning for our articles beginning March.
In the first screenshot, you can see we were growing nicely until April when it dropped and it has remained low since.
Second is a collection of screengrabs from search console. Third is traffic sources - interesting to see the drop from IA...
And no, I don't think we were affected by any algo changes.
Thanks so much!
-
Hello,
Look through Google Search Console & see what pages have dropped, compare March to June 2018, if you could post that report somewhere I can assist you from there.
As Kevin mentioned, did you change the site at all?
-
Some questions to help you analyze:
-
Was it an overall drop in traffic or for specific articles?
-
Did you check your Google Search Console for any messages or did you analyze performance report or etc?
-
Did you look to see any Google Algo Changes?
-
Did you see any drop in Bing Organics?
-
Any major site changes?
Good luck!
-
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
-
Lost almost all organic traffic. Need some help.
Hi Mozers. I blog about our son with Down syndrome (https://noahsdad.com) and you may remember me from this case study here on Moz. https://moz.com/blog/seventeen-ways-to-improve-your-blog-case-study I was getting close to 100,000k a month in organic traffic to our blog, then it slowly started to decline to the point where I am not only getting 3k in organic traffic a month. So basically I lost all of my traffic. I honestly have no idea what is going on or why this happened. I know everyone is busy but would anyone be up for taking a peak into my GA and search console and seeing if you can figure out what may have changed and why my traffic dropped off so much. Our website helps a lot of people so you'd be doing some good and it may even be a good case study post! Thanks so much!
Content Development | | NoahsDad0 -
Blog hasn't ranked since reposting.
Hey Moz fam! I had a blog that was doing pretty well for the target keyword. Unfortunately, to make a long story short, we had an image in it we weren't supposed to so I unpublished it for a few days while we got that sorted out. Since republishing (with all the same content) it has not gotten a single impression. I inspected the URL and it is totally eligible but nothing in the way of organic traffic. Any ideas on how I can recover?
Content Development | | danieldaher1 -
My website is struggling to receive traffic I think I have a serious error
Hi, My website would receive a lot of traffic and then I asked a SEO company who contacted me to do some work on the site. Since then, the site has dropped in the rankings and our traffic has dropped by like a lead balloon. Instead of receiving thousands of visitors, today we have received 10. I am finding that I have articles no longer in Google but they are in Yahoo. Here is an example of an article that was once popular https://www.in2town.co.uk/travel-advice/how-to-save-money-booking-a-holiday-through-a-travel-agent/ I have tried everything and now I do not know where to turn. I am not sure what they have done but everything has now failed. We have not been penalized and our hosting company have said they cannot find anything wrong. Due to this problem we have stopped writing articles and have spent all our time trying to work out what has gone wrong. If anyone can give me advice and point me in the right direction then I would be in your debt.
Content Development | | travelmagazine0 -
Traffic to blog home page is going down after changing my WordPress Theme
I recently changed my wordpress theme from a standard free theme to a newer theme. The home page I switched up a bit adding more calls to action to some of our top posts and leading people to popular categories and so on. This greatly improved the usability of our site as it allowed us to highlight new posts. The previous free template simply listed 10 of our most recent posts on a page with small snippets and then you had to move to the next page to keep reading. Since switching my theme the blog traffic has stayed relatively level. That being said, the specific posts traffic is going up a lot whereas the organic traffic to the blog homepage is now nearly depleted. Is this a common thing to happen or is there anything I can do to fix this issue?
Content Development | | saultienut0 -
Embedded Traffic Stats?
Hi all Wondering if someone could give me a pointer here please..... my client is an information resource on internet safety, it is a non profit website just blogging about internet safety and threats. To cut a long story short, the client has relationships with all the police forces and universities in the UK, they regularly republish content on their sites - with approval (and doesn't have relations with many dozens of sites which do not have approval to republish...) Although the goal of the website is information distribution and not to raise money, the site does have a number of KPIs which it needs to meet to justify its sponsorship by the likes of facebook, google, microsoft etc. We are looking to make the content the site publishes embeddable so rather than just republishing 'our' content and it looking like the third party sites' own work, we at least get the credit. The issue we are trying to work out is down to stats. If site B embeds our article and it gets 1,000 views on their site, do these 1,000 people appear in our stats too? I would guess that it does as the content is being loaded from our site each time the 1,000 people visits. In which case, would these 1,000 hits appear as direct traffic or referral traffic in the stats when they read the content on site B? We have run some tests and not seeing the test site appearing as a referrer in the stats so a little puzzled. Many thanks for any advice
Content Development | | daedriccarl0 -
Great content/news articles - but struggling to drive traffic from them
We publish 2-3 great quality news stories/posts on our sites weekly, but are struggling to gain traffic from external sources for them, other than our own blog and socials. We have followings for each of our sites, but want to expand and get our posts found in other relevant blogs, features, releases etc. The posts are 'Top 10 Tips...', 'How To... in 6 Easy Steps', 'What Makes a Great...' etc. All great things that people want to read about and share. All this of course helps towards the SEO of the sites, but the posts aren't written for that, they are written to guide and inform. My question is, how are other people getting their great content found online, talked about and shared? I personally think that our posts are awesome; containing useful information that will help people. Isn't that what it's all about?
Content Development | | bricktech0 -
How to make a bad posting drop down the search engines
we have had a competitor who has been stealing a lot of content from us and now they have used seo tactics to write a bad article about one of our sites that they have been taking content from, and what we would like to do is to use seo techniques to drop their article down the rankings. We are consulting a solicitor to take action against them as we are fed up of the content being stolen and the other techniques they are using, can anyone give me ideas on the best way to drop this post down the rankings. I was thinking about articles and press releases and blog posts to get higher up in the rankings and do a lot of these to drop their article down the rankings. Our solicitor has already taken action against them in the past and that cost us a fortune and it looks like we are going to have to spend a fortune again, so any help on using seo techniques to drop their article down the rankings would be great.
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How to recover my traffic? How to make a boring subject interesting?
Hi all, your feedback would be hugely appreciated. I've had a mortgage website for about a year and half now that I've painstakingly filled with relevant, informative content. I've seen my traffic ranking in Alexa go from > 14,000,000 a year ago to right around 1,000,000 today, but I got hit really hard in the recent Google updates. I lost about 60% of my traffic at the end of April and have been at a loss as to what to do about it. I wasn't doing anything shady to generate traffic, so my guess is that some of my backlinks were discounted in the update, so my site got hit in the rankings. Now I'm really trying to rework my site to get my traffic back. What would you suggest? I feel almost like I'm starting at square one again because all my efforts thus far got hammered in the updates. Currently I'm updating and reworking some of my content to format it better, make the site more navigable, and better optimize the content for the search engines. I've also hired a virtual assistant to manage my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts to help build traffic that way. I'm keeping up with blogging on a regular basis as well, but it's such a big time suck when I'm trying to get loans funded full time as well. Also, mortgages is kind of a boring subject. Who the heck would want to come back to my site every day and read about mortgages? How can I make the subject interesting and fun so that people want to come back on regular basis? I'm new here and your thoughts are most welcome! Feel free to unleash the tough criticisms too! My site is mortgagesbymark.com if you'd like to take a look at it. Thanks!
Content Development | | MortgagesByMark1