Why do we temporarily rank for highly competitive words after writing a related blog post?
-
I write for a blog that Google probably "likes" at this point because we update so frequently and get a decent amount of traffic.
Sometimes this happens and it has always been puzzling to me:
Let's use an example. Say I write a blog called "How to eat spaghetti." For the next few days, we will get a ton of traffic for people who type "spaghetti." But when I check us on rank trackers we are nowhere to be found for that term. What is happening here? Sometimes the traffic will all be international and located in some random city in Africa or something.
Any thoughts? Super confused by this. We have gotten lots of traffic for extremely competitive words because of this, but it only lasts a couple days.
-
I figured it out. Looks like the corresponding image in that blog entry got indexed on Google Images and ranks #3 because that one hot word is in the alt tag. Crazy
-
Hey James. Thanks for the input.
Maybe I didn't explain myself correctly. In my example, I'm not trying to rank for the word "Spaghetti." But because I published one article with the word "Spaghetti" in the title, we get a ton of Google hits that week for that word, and then that traffic disappears shortly after. I honestly don't think it has much to do with social media because our blog gets very few shares....
-
I'd imagine it is more to do with subscribers, social media posts containing links, referrals and fans who have bookmarked your page etc rather than anything to do with SEO. If your rankings are not improving yet your traffic is, I'd suggest looking at your analytics to see where the traffic is actually coming from - referrals, direct traffic etc.
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
-
Domain Change Post Mortem
Hello, my company changed our domain 2 weeks ago and we are just starting to see traffic level back out, except for Organic. The site is on shopify so it made switching the domain pretty easy, as well as the 301 redirects (no url structure changes). We've taken all the proper steps with google/bing webmaster tools as well as monitoring 404's and 301 testing and don't see any red flags. Does anyone roughly know how long it takes for 301's to re-index and domain authority to start building back up for our new domain? Our old domain was about 13 years old and the new one was parked for quite awhile. p.s. I also noticed a lot of our traffic ending up as referral from our old url. I was able to wipe the sessions from analytics which cut it down, but will this persist for the foreseeable future? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | SchoolhouseElectric0 -
Yahoo and Bing Ranking Hits
Morning, Has anyone else in the UK seen a massive ranking shift on Bing and Yahoo over the last week? One of our eccommerce client's main keywords was ranking #3 and #11 on Bing and Yahoo respectively last week, but today they've dropped to #32 and #35. It seems rather strange as pretty much all of the main keywords have increased on Google. In fact, pretty much all of the Google rankings are the highest they've been since the SEO campaign commenced in October/November! Cheers, Lewis
Reporting & Analytics | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Rank Tracker - above 50
Hi, I have a blog and would like to know where it ranks for certain keywords. Unfortunately however, it's well above the top 50, is there any way of getting its exact position or will Moz only show position 50 and above. Thank you in advance. JG.
Reporting & Analytics | | elite_marketing0 -
Improved keyword ranking but less traffic
Hello fellow mozzers! My collegue and I are a bit puzzled in regards to our recent website statistics. In november 2013, we upgraded the technological platform of our website to be fully HTML5 coded, and implemented the schema.org Products scheme to systematically tag all our products on the site. To prevent too much loss of visitors, we created a 301-redirect table from almost all our old URL's to the specific new ones, as we implemented a new URL structure as well. The first few months were bumpy as expected, making a huge drop in rankings before rising up again. Our keyword rankings are better then ever (60% of the keywords in top 3, average competition, 25% more on first SERP) but our number of visits dropped by about 10%. Our bounce rate went down from 20% to 14%, our returning visits are stable, but our new visitors stats dropped by 25% as well. This comparison was made between equal periods in the current year and last year, using organic data stats. (new technical platform vs. the old one) What could be the reason that our number of visits dropped 10% while our keyword ranking is better then ever? We don't have any manual penalties in GWT and can't understand why visits would drop so much while ranking improved. May it be so easy that there's just less search volume on our ranked content or does anyone have other ideas? Thank you all in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | EconostoNL0 -
Advanced Web Ranking Proxies
Hey, How can i set up multiple proxy server for Advanced Web Ranking? I managed to block everyone from Google the last time I used this 😕 Thanks, Luke.
Reporting & Analytics | | NoisyLittleMonkey0 -
When one of my sites returns a ranking that consistently reads "No Data", what does that say about the site?
I am getting "No Data" reads for some of my sites - I personally think it has to do with the site's construction - especially the landing page... I inherited this site to do SEO - it was not created with on site SEO in mind - please help if you can sites are: www.storagesanangelo.com www.storagemidland.com Should I get webmaster to remove the big map graphic and add text and pics instead... Sure appreciate brilliant thoughts - even about yetis and beer
Reporting & Analytics | | creativeguy0 -
Tool to check pervious rankings for a keyword ?
I am looking a tool/site to check ranking history of specifc keyword . Is this possible ? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | bfletc40 -
Massive raise and drop in keyword ranking
2 weeks ago I had a massive spike in keyword rankings 99 keyword went up. It was a quite happy week. the week later all keywords that went up dropped down to the same positions before the spike. now I have the same situation. this is the happy week with a very high spike. Anybody got a clue what is going on ?
Reporting & Analytics | | interelectronix0