UK Company Major drop in traffic & rankings on one primary keyword since March
-
I am helping out a small UK company who have had a sudden drop in organic search traffic since March 24th.
Investigation highlights some issues with the site,e.g. Potential canonicalization of home page, a few html errors, some inbound links to the /index.html version of the homepage rather than /. But, nothing particualrly major and nothing that is different to pre-March 24th.
The indexed pages looks ok in Google (although Bing is ranking the non-www version of the homepage) but this does not appear in Google's index.
Searches for the company name on Google.co.uk show it as top result & some keywords are ranking reasonably well (based on homepage). Selecting blocks of text from the homepage and it ranks #1, but its Google rank for the primary keyword has gone from #2 pre-March 24th to not in the top 100 results since. SEOMOZ is grading the page A for the keyword which appears prominently on the page & keyword is the first characters of the title. It is not a particularly competitive keyword. Adding UK to the keyword and the page is Google.co.uk ranked #3. It's almost as if they are being penalised for a single keyword which I've never seen or heard of before. Any ideas?
** The company has never carried out any SEO - white hat or black hat. The site is perfectly normal, nothing dodgy or concerning about it at all.**
Thanks in advance for your advice.
-
Hi kchan, thanks for your reply. No, it was the homepage.that was the ranking page. GWT reported a drop in traffic warning but nothing else. Hard to see how this site could have been caught up as over optimised, as no SEO ever carried out!
-
Hello,
Was it a inner page that was ranking for the key phrase before? In the Google Webmaster tool were there any warning messages? After Google's latest algorithm changes for 'over optimised seo' I've actually seen a few sites being punished for single keywords.
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
-
Is it a good idea to optimize for keywords that have no search volume if they're ranked?
Hello Moz Community, I have some questions I hope some of you can help with. We’re doing SEO work for a client that provides outsourced IT and managed IT services in Phoenix, AZ and cities in the Phoenix metro area (i.e. Glendale, Tempe, Scottsdale, etc.) They’re currently ranked for or targeting the following keywords: • consulting phoenix az (1)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marnipatterson
• outsourced it phoenix (2)
• phoenix it support (3)
• it services Scottsdale (5)
• it consulting firm phoenix (targeting)
• it solutions phoenix (targeting) We have recommended the following keywords based on monthly search totals, competitive level and difficulty ratings in Moz. • IT consulting phoenix
• it consultant company
• outsourced it
• it support services
• it consulting services
• outsourcing it
• outsourced tech support Questions
1. While I know it’s a good idea to optimize for keywords that you're currently ranked for, there’s no search volume for any of these. So, I recommended non-geo versions since Google provides search results based on the user’s location. Will this preserve the company's current rankings?
2. If not optimizing for their current keywords will hurt their rankings, will using the current keywords as secondary keywords suffice? If so, do we need to include them in the content for keyword density?
3. Since search engine algorithms now focus so heavily on user intent, I assume we’re covered for all variations of a keyword (i.e. outsource it, outsourced it, outsourcing it, etc.) Is this correct?
4. They want to rank for “cloud services” and “cloud solutions.” Both are very competitive with high difficulty rankings. So, I recommended “cloud migration” and “cloud strategy” as alternatives since these are the main services they provide. Will including “cloud services” and “cloud solutions” as secondary keywords help them increase their rankings for both? If you’ve dealt with a similar situation, I'd appreciate your insight and advice. Thanks!0 -
Why have my rankings dropped?
I have a client who has just seen his average page rank creep up from around 39 to 34 over about two months, then it appears to have dropped back to position 40+ in the space of a week. I believe he's made a lot of changes to targeted keywords, so I'd like to think it's simply because his old targeted keywords are dropping and new keywords still have to build their rankings. But I'm also worried in case he has over-optimised and might get getting penalised. Any advice on where to start digging?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
One domain or two for one company with two lines of business?
Let's say you are building a new company that is involved in two lines of business. Let's for example say one line of business is handling logistics for large conventions where the customer(s) are large corporation and the other line is for wedding planning. Let's say that for certain reasons the owner wants to operate under one brand name, say "PROEVENT" So they will market themselves as PROEVENT Convention Logistics and PROEVENT Wedding Planners. From an SEO perspective, if you have one side of the business doing B-to-B corporate business and the other doing B-to-C do you create two different websites on different domains (proeventconventions.com and proeventweddings.com) with unique design and content, or, do you just use provent.com in order to build better domain authority and on your marketing you use conventions.provent.com that takes you to the convention section of the website and weddings.provent.com takes you to the weddings section?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jazee0 -
My website is ranking well on most of keywords. How do I find more keywords in order to drive more traffic to my website?
I have a website which is ranking well on some good keywords ie generic and long tail. It is also ranking for some really competitive keywords. and now getting constant traffic. I want to increase organic traffic to my website. What are the best possible ways to do this? How to research more keywords and how to identify that they will really work? Please help, I am confused.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rishi.ast0 -
New URL Structure caused virtually All rankings to drop 5 to 10 positions in latest report ?.. Is this normal
Hi All, We changed out url structure on our website to both reduce both the size of our category url structure (reduce the number of layers '/ ' ) and also to replace the underscores we originally had to hyphens... We did this during a new site design. Anyway we relaunched it a week ago. We did the 301 redirects from old to new , new site maps etc, and the latest moz ranking report is showing most of them dropping 5 to 10 positions i.e from 3rd to 10th etc... Is this something to be expected , and then it should recover or should this be telling me alarm bells. I would have expected not such a negative shift in all my rankings ?.. Anyone thoughts of this would be greatly appreciated... thanks Pete .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Negative SEO and big decrease in main keyword ranking
Hi about 4 months ago, I had ranking #1 to #4 for "SEO" in Persian in my country; but someone made about 1000 spam links to my site and some other industry sites. I disavowed the links when I see (after 2-3 days of OSE detection). But now I'm in the page 2 of rankings for the most important keyword I ever had. The point is, My visits increased in this months, but I lost my rankings for this keyword not others. The spammy links targeted my main keyword. Whats you idea to get my ranking back? I'm writing content about SEO, Marketing and blogging for about 4 years and I don't have any bad resume in buying links or stuffing keywords or ... All natural.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masoudfatemi0 -
Site architecture: Deep drop menus & flat hidden menu?
I hope this makes sense. I am creating a site that will have normal drop down menu structure that will be about 3 levels deep: site.com/category/topic/sub-topic . I also want to add content that will be set up under a hidden menu, but with a sidebar module (placed on the relevant pages that are set up under the drop down) with links to other custom pages that will be relevant to the drop menu pages, but i'm hoping that the flat structure pages will show better for search: site.com/content-page The reason I am asking is because I have seen a competitor do this for a personal injury law firm and they show everywhere (throughout California) for vanity search -"city car accident lawyer". When you go to the site, they have a personal injury drop down that is 3 layers deep, but when you click down the layers, and look at the URL, they are all "flat" site.com/car-accident-lawyer, not site.com/personal-injury/accidents/car-accident-lawyer. Is having a hidden menu a problem? Is this strategy problematic in any way? Hope that makes sense. Thank you for any direction. BB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
Large Site - Complete Site URL Change and How to Preserver Organic Rankings/Traffic
Hello Community, What is your experience with site redesign when it comes to preserving the traffic? If a large enterprise website has to go through a site-wide enhancement (resulting in change of all URLs and partial content), what do you expect from Organic rankings and traffic? I assume we will experience a period that Google needs to "re-orientate" itself with the new site, if so, do you have similar experience and tips on how to minimize the traffic loss? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b.digi0