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!
-
I think that the bigger question you should be asking is.. "is our site making us more money now or not". With out a open door to your data I would guess that even though your rankings raised for your targeted keywords, you might have dropped in ranking for some less relevant keywords (Hints why your bounce rate improved). Has your conversion rate gone up? A lose in traffic is not always a bad thing, if you are losing irrelevant traffic. I would say that if your quality indicators have improved than I wouldn't be to concerned about the lose in traffic. I would just start focusing on how to move forward with identifying the next set of relevant keywords that you want to rank for. Hope this helps!
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
-
What's more accurate? GA queries data or Moz/SEMRush keyword data for rankings
What do you guys think? What's more accurate? GA queries data or Moz/SEMRush keyword data for rankings? Any thoughts appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | znotes0 -
Drop in indexation but increase in organic traffic
We've had a puzzling drop in indexed pages on our ecommerce website. My crawl returns just over 25k items. Until 19/6 we had about 23-24k indexed. Then we experienced a sudden drop from 19/6 to 26/6: from 23,400 to 18,999, losing 4.4k pages from one week to the next. At the same time, our organic traffic has not decreased, it actually increased, however, it's only been a couple of weeks so that may be coincidence. A few things that have happened during the past few weeks: 31/5: we implemented pagination on category pages to avoid issues with duplicate content - could it be that this led to a decrease in indexed pages 3 weeks later? However, I can only find about 1.5k pages in my crawl that are page 2+ 18-19/6: we had some website outages over the weekend; as a B2B business, we don't get much traffic over the weekend, so I can't see an impact to traffic. However, the following week, indexation dropped by another 250 (then stayed the same this past week), so I don't think this was a factor. 21/6: we retired another website and migrated it to our main website. However, all pages were redirected to existing pages so no new pages were created for the migration. This doesn't really explain a decrease in indexation, but may account for some of the increase in organic traffic; however not all as the retired website hardly got any organic traffic. So, should we be worried? As our website is quite large, it would probably be quite difficult to pin point exactly which pages dropped off the index, but a loss of 19% of pages is quite significant. Then again, it doesn't appear to have negatively impacted organic traffic... Have you got any suggestions for what I should be looking at to find out what happened? Should I be worried at this point? I will definitely continue to have an eye on how our organic traffic (and indexation) develops but I am not sure if there is anything I can do at this point. I'd appreciate your advice on this, to make sure I am not missing something blindingly obvious. Thanks! RmWaNib JJm4tC3
Reporting & Analytics | | ViviCa10 -
Why Is My Traffic Going Up But My Alexa Rating Getting Worse?
I am curious why my Alexa rating has been getting worse over the last few weeks. My organic traffic is up, direct visits and social networking visits are up but my Alexa has been getting worse and worse. Is anyone having the same problem? Any feedback would be helpful. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Videogamefan0 -
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 -
We lost great amount of Google Traffic. Need Expert Advice, Please!
We are in the business of selling home and commercial light fixtures for about 10 years now. Our website is a very large ecommerce website with more than 40K pages including category, sub-category and product pages. We have been getting decent organic traffic mostly from highly competitive keywords and also from product/solution specific long tail keywords. Recently when Google changed the EMD algo we have seen a dip in the traffic (say about 60%). I can't be so sure that this is because of EMD update, but it started happening only after this update. There has been a rank drop from 1st page to 2nd page, decrease in no. of keywords driving traffic, decrease in no. of pages driving traffic, all these things have an negative impact on our organic revenue. I know that our back link portfolio is bad and the reason behind this is the SEO companies that we previously worked with, Thanks to them for this sloppy work. Other than back links, Is there anything fundamentally wrong on our website. Here is the URL http://bit.ly/QVFHgr
Reporting & Analytics | | goldenageusa0 -
Should we add the city to our keywords for a site that is only local?
This is one of those things I have done for a long time and all of a sudden asked myself was it necessary: For our local clients, we add the city name (Houston, KC, Birmingham) after each keyword. An example would be TestSite.com/big-tester-houston A Title Tag might be Big Tester Houston | Test Site, etc. Where appropriate we do the same with H1 or H2's and occasionally in the content we will use the city name. The thought being that since the site is only for a given city, it will be deemed more relevant than a site from outside.( I understand there are other factors in SEO; this is a specific question around adding the city). Yes, we also optimize with local directories/citation sites. Is this overkill, is it even worthwhile? Is there any evidence one way or another? I would love some strong opinions backed up with something other than anecdotal evidence where possible.
Reporting & Analytics | | RobertFisher0 -
What factors does the Keyword Difficulty Tool measure?
Hi Guys I am new to this community and finding loads of informative stuff here. The keyword difficulty tool looks very interesting. I think google keyword tool competetion field is based on PPC competetion? Will i be right in saying that the moz keyword difficulty tool measures top 10 ranking pages, their age, backlinks etc?
Reporting & Analytics | | SamBuck0 -
Free Keyword Tracking Tool
Hi, Any suggestion which is the best FREE keyword ranking tool. I know digital point offers one but they will install some script in the site which might slow it down... Is there any alternative?
Reporting & Analytics | | krishru0