Ranking well for main key terms but site traffic has dropped sharply?
-
Hello All,
Just a quick question.
Since the penguin update our site www.caravanguard.co.uk has seen some pretty fluctuating movement in Google, many of our key terms dropped over night, but over the last few weeks they have slowly started to move back up the rankings.
The bizarre thing is despite the recover in rankings our unique traffic has taken a fairly large whack in numbers. Seasonality? Weather? ( it's been nice in the UK for a change)
I can only assume the longer tail terms are taking more time to recover. I have tried to look into our back link profile and have noticed a little too much in terms concise keyword targeting, How do you go about changing these terms and removing the really bad links (struggling to identify the worst cases) on totally irrelevant sites or poor directories.
Put in place before I started here
Any help truly appreciated.
Regards
Tim
-
I have been looking at the organic keyword search position rankings on Google. I think
-
The bizarre thing is despite the recover in rankings our unique traffic has taken a fairly large whack in numbers. Seasonality? Weather? ( it's been nice in the UK for a change)
What rankings are you looking at? There are image rankings, blog rankings, news rankings. I'd bet on images.
-
Thanks for the insight Sven,
I have a had a look over the stats for the main keywords in our analytics and there is certainly a downward trend for our main keywords. I have been keeping track of the Ranking for our main terms via the rankings tool on SEO moz - we dropped as low as 10 from around position 5 since the Penguin update. In the last ranking results we had climbed back up to 8.
According to Google Queries we have had no impressions or clicks for our main terms for the last three days - I am hoping this is due to it needing time to catch up.... otherwise something is very wrong.
Due to the seasonality of our market, as soon as the weather is nice people go out in their motorhomes and caravans, this will also affect traffic to a degree.
NOTE - just looked in webmaster tools - this does only go up to the 27th of May not to the 30th so a couple of days behind.
-
Hi Tim,
Do you have Google Analytics installed? If so it should be possible to find out what's happening! This is what I'd do:
-
Get the 100 best performing keywords for january - march.
-
Get the 100 best performing keywords for the past two weeks.
-
see which keywords you used to get traffic on but currently don't get traffic on.
-
if you still rank for these keywords, it's probably because of search volumes and if you don't rank first page for these keywords it's because of your rankings. (probably).
Obviously it's a bit more tricky if your long tail rankings only dropped slightly. If that's the case you could try to find out for which keywords you used to get >10% of the search volume in visitors. It's higly likely that you used to rank top 3 for these words. If you rank 6th or 7th for these keywords now you probably lost some ground there.
Also you can checkout the search engine optimization feature in Google Analytics in case you have GA linked to your webmastertools.
This is why it's important to document your rankings over time (on lot's of keywords). You could use a ranktracker for that.
Best of luck!
Sven Witteveen
Expand Online
-
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
-
Can site blocked for US visitors rank well internationally?
Because of regulatory reasons, a stock trading site needs to be blocked to United States visitors Since most of google datacenters seem to be located in the US, can this site rank well in the other countries where does business despite being blocked in the US? Do U.S. Google data centers influence only US rankings?
Algorithm Updates | | tabwebman0 -
Rankings fluctuating by around 10 pages between night and day
Hi all, I'm experiencing something very odd with my website ranking at the moment. My homepage is fluctuating in rank for my main keyword by 10 pages every day and night. So, during the day i am on page 14, 15 or 16 for my main keyword yet by night i am on page 5 or 6. This trend has continued for the past 7 days now and i can't quite understand why this is. I'm using pagewash dot net to carry out manual searches and a ranking tool - both of which produce exactly the same result. Does anyone have any experience of this or why this is happening? My domain is around 8 years old and has around 50,000 pages. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | MarkHincks0 -
Top resulting sites sites for a specific keyword
I'm teaching myself SEO so that I can speak more intelligently to it with my clients. I've spent a great deal of time on seomoz and love it. The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know and that brings me to my current question. I can search on a keyword and see results, however I see every URL available. I'm looking for a simple way to see the root domains for the top 100-500 resulting websites for a specific keyword. Is there an easy way to get this information I'm sure it's right in front of me, but I can't find it. Many thanks, ahossom
Algorithm Updates | | ahossom0 -
Did anyone else notice a DA Drop this week?
I have our site + 4 other competitors' sites in my SEOmoz campaigns and all of the DA's dropped by 1 or 2 points. Has anyone else noticed a drop this week? Two months ago, all of these websites also went down 1 or 2 DA points, then some of them came back up a point the next month. What's going on? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | pbhatt0 -
Old Site But No Traffic - Can Anyone Tell Reason ?
Hi , Can anyone please tell me why this site http://www.travelscience.com is not getting any traffic? Its 13 years old domain having 2340 indexed pages and Its Alexa rank is 6186158 Can anyone please identity the problems with it. I found it from Google doing the keyword research on the Travel topics. I am curious to know the potential problem with this site. Thanks in advance for your time. Regards
Algorithm Updates | | kywebsol0 -
Why would Google read different pages to rank for a keyword?
I have noticed a large drop in a number of keywords in the latest rankings report. I have checked the results on the 'Ranking History Graph' and it appears that Google is reading different pages for the specific keyword and therefore, giving large fluctuations in ranking dependant on the page from week to week. Why would this be happening?
Algorithm Updates | | Benjamin3790 -
Another Domain ranking instead of my Domain
Hi My Domain name is Replicahause.net, 2 weeks ago my server had an outage for 3 days and my rankings dissappeared in google entirely, however i also noticed that when i typed in my domain name "replicahause" or "replicahause.net" , i would see abhishekyadav.com appearing on #1 in google which does a 301 into Replicahause.net I was able to convince the owner of Abhishekyadav to remove the 301 but my site Replicahause.net's Rankings still does not appear to have come back to google, is there something i'm missing here ? We were ranked #1 to #10 for at least 40 keywords, they've just seemed to dissappeard after the server downtime we had and the 301 from AbhishekYadav.com Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | jansimon0 -
Bing Traffic drop
Anyone notice a drop in Bing traffic on January 26th? Slashed by 50% and holding for the past three weeks. 100% white hat site
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0