How can we improve our traffic?
-
Hi everyone, thanks for taking a look at this. We are looking at improving our traffic for our website. We are a tour company based in Thailand that caters to 18-25 year olds, mainly in the UK and USA.
Our site is - http://www.starfishvolunteers.com/
A few years ago the now ex-team hired an SEO company who outsourced to a team in India. Things were considered to be going very well in terms of traffic but I suspect that a lot of it was shady link building tactics. The site was designed poorly, urls were a mess and there was a lot of misinformation on there. Fast forward a few years and there is a new team in place, we redesigned the site, added a blog & booking system, cleared out the misinformation and got ourselves a Moz Pro subscription.
I only have Google search stats starting from 2013 and the total traffic (sessions) for that year was roughly 25,000. In 2014 traffic dropped to 19,000 and for the first five month of this year we are currently at 9,000.
Obviously reduced traffic doesn't look good and we would very much like to get our numbers back up.
We are tracking keywords in Moz and although we are ranking in the top 10 for a bunch of them the traffic just isn't going back up.
Here are our thoughts on why we might be losing traffic -
- We're targeting the wrong keywords.
- We are being penalised.
- The competition overtook us.
Right now we are at a bit of a loss because we don't know what direction to head in. Could it be our keywords? We would love to know what you think and sincerely appreciate the feedback. We will try and share any data that you think might be relevant or useful.
-
Hi there
Have you checked in Search Console to see if you have a manual action? That will tell you right away if you have been penalized or if you have any major site issues.
I would take a look at your backlinks - I see some directories and questionable links in Majestic. Also, when I checked SEMRush, I can see a pretty significant dip (attached) in May 2012, which was around the time that Penguin 1.1 hit.
I would also take a look at your on-site SEO, especially with your information architecture. Right now, a lot your site architecture is flat, meaning everything lives off the root domain.
Run through your site's metrics, including Domain Authority, and see what opportunities you have in improvement. Take a look at your content and take an empathetic stance with your audience - if you were a user or customer, what would you want to see? Does that line up with your research?
Take a look at the Academy section as well for Moz - lots of opportunities! Also, try doing some competitive analysis to see if you are missing opportunities that your competition is taking advantage of!
Hope this all helps! Good luck to you!
-
Had a very quick look. There is plenty to do. I have not looked from a technical side - Moz should do that for you, highlight deficiencies. I would suggest a keyword review. ie you are not on the first page in the US according to Semrush for your prime keyword phrases - volunteer thailand etc. So I would undertake a keyword analysis identify what you want - if that is it.
Best starting point is this blog post from Moz. https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research
Also is Thailand as a volunteer destination this year as popular as it was a few years ago? Anyway you should focus on improving your ranking regardless.
So without doing much more work, as the keyword research is an internal - cant really assist - i would review you Title and H1 tags. Not sure I would start with affordable for your title & use the word experience. "Volunteering in Thailand" - maybe the optimum way but as said. There are 1000 things you could do, but in short i would start with keyword research in your instance, assume moz has crawled your site and you are addressing those issues.
Then build a strategy from there.
Good luck let me know if can assist further.
If
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
-
Target Search Terms Changed - does this affect traffic?
We spent the last 12 months targeting a particular search term (mortgage broker) and have been ranking well for it consistently for about 6 months now. We have decided to change the target search term to something else (insurance broker) but noticed that our traffic has started to decline since we started doing this. We are still ranking well for the initial search term, and our ranking is slowly improving for the new targeted search term in SERPs but traffic is down about 60% from January. Is it normal/expected for this to happen?
Keyword Research | | monique-plaw1 -
Text in my site is too little, what I can do to enhance the ranking?!
Hi Guys, My site contents depending mainly on the image with little titles so wondering what I can do yo enhance the site ranking?! Thanks
Keyword Research | | Moheb0 -
Anchor Text Phrases: Can you get 2 for 1?
Using a phrase such as "Compare Car Insurance Quotes" as the anchor text, will google count that phrase as an exact much as well as the shorter version "Compare Car Insurance" or is it only the full phrase? I assume also that keyword phrases on the page will count as 2 for 1 as google will just look at the set of words and use both phrases? Thoughts? Ash
Keyword Research | | AshShep10 -
How to calculate how much traffic and how much revenue we shoudl expect?
Hi, I am trying to select some keywords and keywords I selected i know that it'll be bring traffic but how would i know how much traffic it could bring and what revenue i should expect? Thanks
Keyword Research | | Rubix0 -
How can my news website display on first page
Hello, I just would like to know how can my news website display on first page in Google what should i do, the time i use WordPress to run the site. i have more than 20,000 post but i don't get good number of clicks my website is www.edb-news.com thank you
Keyword Research | | MajedAtwi0 -
How can I best optimize only meta descriptions for an ecommerce?
Recently, a client ask me for a total change of all the meta descriptions in his website. For the moment, this is the only work he want to do in his website. I said him about the difficulty about doing SEO only optimizing some parts of the whole, but he didn´t care. He only wants to change meta descriptions! That's right, it's up to you! The website is about supplements for bodybuilding and fitness. Each category of the ecommerce deals with a type of product: testosterone boosters, protein powders, weight gainers, etc. And now my question is: Should I choose different keywords for each category of products, or the same keywords for the whole website? I started choosing the same general keywords for homepage and nav, and category related keywords for categories and products. Doing well? Thanks.
Keyword Research | | sergio_redondo0 -
High AdWords Cost with Low Traffic
I'm seeing a lot of keywords with very little traffic but high, sometimes very high cost per click in AdWords. Can someone explain to me why this is common? I'm researching buying keywords. With the low traffic they seem like little value but when I see people $20 a click it seems like high converting and thus maybe worth going after. But the high cost is just not making any sense to me for many of these keywords. Thanks.
Keyword Research | | RustyF0 -
How can i track keywords history
i need to keep a record for all keywords history , is there any way that we can track keywords history so we can compare each week with the previous weeks ?
Keyword Research | | omarfk0