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
-
76% drop in traffic for iModular.com
_Hello everyone....I am in the midst of a huge battle and Moz is my intelligence headquarters. Unfortunately, I just experienced a 76% drop in my search visibility after having had a hopeful increase over the past month. I have done nothing with the web site accept for add quality content. No links, no nada. _
Algorithm Updates | | MattBanes0 -
Page Rank Metrics Disapearing
Hi Everyone. I keep hearing from different people that googles PAGE RANK , Will soon be eliminated. Has anyone heard anything more about this ? Or is this a myth? This would make it more complex for the average person to rely on DA and TF etc.. Would love to hear from you guys. I actually like the PR rating system. Also have websites more then a year old which are still not showing actual PR yet .Maybe delayed or maybe not. Robert
Algorithm Updates | | Yellow20000 -
Need Advice - Google Still Not Ranking
Hi Team - I really need some expert level advice on an issue I'm seeing with our site in Google. Here's the current status. We launched our website and app on the last week of November in 2014 (soft launch): http://goo.gl/Wnrqrq When we launched we were not showing up for any targeted keywords, long tailed included, even the title of our site in quotes. We ranked for our name only, and even that wasn't #1. Over time we were able to build up some rankings, although they were very low (120 - 140). Yesterday, we're back to not ranking for any keywords. Here's the history: While developing our app, and before I took over the site, the developer used a thin affiliate site to gather data and run a beta app over the course of 1 - 2 years. Upon taking on the site and moving to launch the new website/app I discovered what had been run under the domain. Since than the old site has been completely removed and rebuild, with all associated urls (.uk, .net, etc...) and subdomains shutdown. I've allowed all the old spammy pages (thousands of them to 404). We've disavowed the old domains (.net, .uk that were sending a ton of links to this), along with some links that seemed a little spammy that were pointing to our domain. There are no manual actions or messaged in Google Webmaster Tools. The new website uses (SSL) https for the entire site, it scores a 98 / 100 for a mobile usability (we beat our competitors on Google's PageSpeed Tool), it has been moved to a business level hosting service, 301's are correctly setup, added terms and conditions, have all our social profiles linked, linked WMT/Analytics/YouTube, started some Adwords, use rel="canonical", all the SEO 101 stuff ++. When I run the page through the moz tool for a specific keyword we score an A. When I did a crawl test everything came back looking good. We also pass using other tools. Google WMT, shows no html issues. We rank well on Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. However, for some reason Google will not rank the site, and since there is no manual action I have no course of action to submit a reconsideration request. From an advanced stance, should we bail on this domain, and move to the .co domain (that we own, but hasn't been used before)? If we 301 this domain over, since all our marketing is pointed to .com will this issue follow us? I see a lot of conflicting information on algorithmic issues following domains. Some say they do, some say they don't, some say they do since a lot of times people don't fix the issue. However, this is a brand new site, and we're following all of Google's rules. I suspect there is an algorithmic penalty (action) against the domain because of the old thin affiliate site that was used for the beta and data gathering app. Are we stuck till Google does an update? What's the deal with moving us up, than removing again? Thoughts, suggestions??? I purposely, did a short url to leave out the company name, please respect that, since I don't want our issues to popup on a web search. 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | get4it0 -
Responsive websites rank better?
In the upcoming months, or even now, do you think responsive websites will rank higher?
Algorithm Updates | | CFSSEO0 -
Links from high Domain authority sites
I have a relatively uncompetitive niche ranking around number 6 for my keywords. Would getting a few links from some Moz DA 80-90 and DA 90-100 sites help my rankings a lot? Some of the pages linking to me from these sites might be deep in the site pretty far away from the home page with pagerank of "unranked" or a grayed out bar and these pages linking to me might not have many links at all other than from the internal links of the site itself and would have a Moz PA of 10 or 20. Would these pass much pagerank or authority to my site or would they not be worth going after? These links to my site would be in context on a blog. Thanks mozzers!
Algorithm Updates | | Ron100 -
Does anyone know if Google ranks a responsive site, or a specific mobile site higher than each other?
I have heard that Google favors specific .m sites overs responsive designs in it's rankings. Does anyone know if this is true? And, if there is any supporting information. I have been in contact with our account team at Google but haven't had a response on this as yet. I appreciate any help on this. Cheers!
Algorithm Updates | | Fasthosts0 -
Why did my traffic from USA decline so much?
Our website (http://www.golfbutler.com) has been running since April 2010. For the first year or so, traffic from the USA counted for more than 70% of the total traffic. Then for about 6-9 months the traffic incoming from the USA slowly declined to 40-50%. For the last 2-3 months the USA traffic further reduced to about 5% of the total traffic. All the while our content focus did not change much. It is still heavily targeting USA. All in all our traffic did not change much, other countries picked up the pace, particularly Canada. We are located in Canada but our server is hosted in the USA. Anybody has an idea why our USA traffic has declined so much? Since 50% of all golfers are in USA, I would expect at least 50% of our traffic coming from there. We do not run any online advertizing so this cannot be the issue. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | phil_golfbutler.com0 -
Should I use canonical tags on my site?
I'm trying to keep this a generic example, so apologies if this is too vague. On my main website, we've always had a duplicate content issue. The main focus of our site is breaking down to specific, brick and mortar locations. We have to duplicate the description of product/service for every geographic location (this is a legal requirement). So for example, you might have the parent "product/service" page targeting the term, and then 100's of sub pages with "product/service San Francisco", "product/service Austin", etc. These pages have identical content except for the geographic location is dynamically swapped out. There is also additional useful content like google map of area, local resources, etc. As I said this was always seen as an SEO issue, specifically you could see in the way that googlebot would crawl pages and how pagerank flowed through the site that having 100's of pages with identical copy and just swapping out the geographic location wasn't seen as good content, however we still always received traffic and conversions for the long tail geographic terms so we left it. Las year, with Panda, we noticed a drop in traffic and thought it was due to this duplicate issue so I added canonical tags to all our geographic specific product/service pages that pointed back to the parent page, that seemed to be received well by google and traffic was back to normal in short order. However, recently what I notice a LOT in our SERP pages is if I type in a geographic specific term, i.e. "product/service san francisco", our deep page with the canonical tag is what google is ranking. Google inserts its own title tag on the SERP page and leaves the description blank as it doesn't index the page due to the canonical tag on the page. Essentially what I think it is rewarding is the site architecture which organizes the content to the specific geo in the URL: site.com/service/location/san-francisco. Other than that there is no reason for it to rank that page. Sorry if this is lengthy, thanks for reading all of that! Essentially my question is, should I keep the canonical tags on the site or take them off since Google insists on ranking the page? If I am ranking already then the potential upside to doing that is ranking higher (we're usually in the 3-6 spot on the result page) and also higher CTR because we can get a description back on our resulting page. The counter argument is I'm already ranking so leave it and focus on other things. Appreciate your thoughts on this!
Algorithm Updates | | edu-SEO0