Organic Traffic: Hockey-stick growth followed by slow rampdown of death!
-
My site, Site Builder Report, was started last year.
Months 1 - 6 saw modest organic traffic growth.
Months 6 - 9 saw explosive organic traffic growth.
Months 9 - 12 have seen a steady decrease in organic traffic.(I've attached a graph for visualizing this)
The site has not changed much over this time. In fact, in the last 3 months, I've done two things to try to get organic traffic trending upwards again:
- Increased the amount of long-form articles on the site (from 1 new article every 3 weeks to 1 new article every week)
- Fixed approxately 150 five hunded (500) errors in Google Webmaster Tools three weeks ago (converted them to 404s)
Neither fix has really been able to change the trend (although perhaps it's too early to tell with the fixing of errors).
Does this downtrend warrant concern? It's having significant business effects- would hiring an SEO consultant be the next step for reversing this trend? Any thoughts?
-
... killing me Steven ; )
It is really tough to say; however, I typed "website builder reviews" into Google Trends and it looks like there was a drop in searches for that terminology in March, which would correspond to what I am seeing on your graph.
Mike
-
I thought your graph displayed traffic and not rankings, how are you SERPs did they drop? Or are you still ranking in the same position for your keywords?
Because if the rankings are the same, it could be (I know generally this gets sorted out within first few months) but could be the issue of google still trying to figure out where to rank you: http://www.linkbuildr.com/reasons-why-new-pages-rank-well-then-drop/
-
Hi Vladim! I'm not sure I know what you mean- I attached a graph that might help visualize how the rankings have changed over time
-
Thanks Mike, sorry the post may be a bit unclear. I meant "Hockey Stick" as a metaphor.
The website actually targets keywords such as "website builders", "website builder reviews"
-
Hi Steven,
How are your rankings have they changed?
-
Hi Steven,
My guess would be you are seeing the downtrend, because of the season.
Here is the data I pulled from Google Trends for "hockey stick" - as you can see, the peaks tend to be in December and January for the year.
My guess things will be slow until next year when the season picks back up.
Hope this helps.
Mike
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
-
Our Sites Organic Traffic Went Down Significantly After The June Core Algorithm Update, What Can I Do?
After the June Core Algorithim Update, the site suffered a loss of about 30-35% of traffic. My suggestions to try to get traffic back up have been to add metadata (since the majority of our content is lacking it), as well ask linking if possible, adding keywords to alt images, expanding and adding content as it's thin content wise. I know that from a technical standpoint there are a lot of fixes we can implement, but I do not want to suggest anything as we are onboarding an SEO agency soon. Last week, I saw that traffic for the site went back to "normal" for one day and then saw a dip of 30% the next day. Despite my efforts, traffic has been up and down, but the majority of organic traffic has dipped overall this month. I have been told by my company that I am not doing a good job of getting numbers back up, and have been given a warning stating that I need to increase traffic by 25% by the end of the month and keep it steady, or else. Does anyone have any suggestions? Is it realistic and/or possible to reach that goal?
Algorithm Updates | | NBJ_SM2 -
When sub domains take away the traffic from search; will this helps or hurts main website rankings?
Hi all, We have some of the landing pages on our sub domains which are getting ranked for our brand related queries and taking away the traffic as we don't have pages to rank for those search queries. I would like to know if this scenario hurts or helps our main website ranking as the traffic to the main website is getting diverted to sub domain. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
WT.Srch - parameter recorded as organic traffic?
Hi I have a lot of revenue for yesterdays organic traffic attributed to ?WT.srch=1&WT.mc_id=slGO&kw=8695 When looking in Google at what this means I have found this: To ensure you can accurately differentiate traffic from paid placements from organic traffic, use the WT.srch=1 parameter in the URL from the referring search engine for all paid searches. This parameter always has a value of 1. Organic searches do not include this parameter in the URL. Note that Search Engine Campaign results are displayed in the Marketing > Search Engine >section of the Webtrends Analytics 9 Complete template, not in the Campaigns section. We no longer use webtrends, what I need to know is, did this traffic/revenue come from organic or paid?
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Weekly traffic from Google: How do you explain this?
Hello here, I have question for you. Please, have a look at the attached image from my website analytics which shows the unique visits trend of the last 2 months. What it is interesting is that every Monday Google brings me more traffic than any other day of the week, whereas on Saturdays it gives me the lowest traffic. And looks like that's a pretty regular weekly pattern. Why is Google doing that? What does that mean? Why such a clear and steady pattern? I am eager to know your thoughts about this! CGuULrN.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | fablau0 -
[G Penalty?] Significant Traffic Drop From All Sources
My client's traffic started to significantly decrease around Nov 21 (Panda update 22). This includes traffic from all sources - search engines (G, B, & Y!), direct, AND referral. At first we thought it was a G penalty but G answered our reconsideration request by stating that no manual penalty had occured. It could be algo penalty, but again, the site has been hit across all sources. Client has done zero backlinking - it is all natural. No Spam, etc.. All of his on-site SEO is perfect (700+ pages indexed, all unique content, unique title and desc). On Oct 16, he switched from his old URL to a new URL and did proper redirects. (Last year - Dec 2011 - he switched his CMS to Drupal and although there was a temporary decrease in traffic, it showed recovery within a month or so.) He does zero social on his site and he has many ads above the fold. Nevertheless, the traffic decrease is not source specific. In other words, all sources have decreased since Nov 21, 2012 and have not recovered. What is going on? What can be the explanation for decrease in traffic across all sources? This would be easy to answer if it was only Google Organic decrease but since direct and referral have also been hit, we cannot locate the problem. Please share your personal experiences as well as advice on where we should look. Could this be negative SEO? Where would we look? ANY ADVICE IS WELCOME !!!! Every bit counts Thanks!!
Algorithm Updates | | GreenPush0 -
Decline in traffic but no change in rankings
I'm comparing our best search traffic month in 2011 (March) with our current traffic (April)and have seen significant declines in traffic, despite no change in our rankings or even improved rankings for the same terms. Trying to sort out an explanation. We have been a white-hat SEO site since our inception over 10 years ago. Our SEO consultant doesn't think we've been affected by any algo changes, at least not to any significant degree. My only explanation for this possibly anomaly is: decrease in the use of the KW terms in search over time (how to determine?) generalized increase in PPC instead of organic search driving traffic possibility that Adv Web Rankings is no longer accurately collecting SERP rankings Does anyone have any other thoughts or considerations that might explain the decline in traffic, despite maintenance or improvement in rankings? Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | ahw0 -
Ranking #1 for decent traffic keywords, but not receiving any traffic?
A site I work on is ranked number 1 for a few keywords. To see how much a keyword is searched per month I rely on Google Adwords Keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). Using this tool I see that the keyword receives 880 local monthly searches and another keyword they rank #1 for receives 1300 local monthly searches. To me these keywords are not the biggest as far as traffic but they are not small by any means. Now here is the issue. Like mentioned above, the site nmber 1 for multiple keywords. They have been ranked number 1 for these keywords for months. Looking in analytics the other day I notice that on a month to month basis both of these keywords are getting 1, or 2 visits. This past month (October) one of the keywords did not receive ANY visits, and that is being ranked #1 for a 1300 monthly searched keyword. It just doesn’t make sense. I would imagine getting at least 100 or so visits a month from these search terms. Could someone please help me understand this a little bit better?
Algorithm Updates | | WhiteHat120 -
How to increase my traffic?
I've performed countless SEO tactics, post tons of unique content. social bookmark tons of it. Facebook, Twitter, etc. Implement new sections to my site all the time in the past month I've implemented a dating site and a discussion forum. Yet my traffic pretty much always stays the same. We are at a level where our site is now the best place on the web to find disability news, and I can't really think of how else to improve it without simply having it more active. Is my niche just too small? http://ablemagazine.co.uk
Algorithm Updates | | craven220
