9 Steps to Diagnosing Lost Search Engine Traffic
For the past few weeks I’ve been tasked with reviewing a few different sites that have seen a loss in traffic – their owners hoped to find out why. I love these kinds of reviews because it’s like solving a mystery or figuring out a puzzle. While it’s not always possible to determine the exact cause for the traffic loss, I can usually make some educated guesses based on what I dig up in Google Analytics.
Here are 9 steps you can take to diagnose the cause of lost search engine traffic:
- Determine what type of traffic loss you’re dealing with. Many people look at Google’s overview page, see a loss of overall traffic to their website, and assume that they must have lost their rankings in Google and the targeted traffic that comes with it. This may or may not be the case. Be sure to check for search engine traffic, and even more specifically Google non-paid traffic.
- Look at the extent of the traffic loss. Your research will be very different depending on whether there was a gradual decline in traffic or a sudden, drastic drop. I reviewed a site last week that lost all of their Google unpaid traffic overnight! This sort of loss is typically a technical issue such as a robots.txt file or a nofollow directive that keeps search engine spiders from indexing your pages. Sometimes it’s not actually a loss of traffic at all – your analytics code could have been inadvertently removed from all or most of the pages, making it appear like a traffic loss. I have seen all of the above more times than I can count in just the last couple of months!
- Compare apples to apples. Many businesses are cyclical or seasonal. A gift site may see huge spikes in traffic the months leading up to Christmas or the weeks before other holidays. This means that comparing any month to the previous month may not tell you the whole story. A drop in traffic in January is probably fairly normal for a gift site. If you’ve got more than a year’s worth of data, you’ll want to compare this month’s traffic to the same month in previous years. Ideally, you’d of course want to see a growth in traffic. And if you don’t, then you may very well have a problem on your hands. If you don’t have data that goes back that far, you can compare month to month, but be sure to take the data with a grain of salt.
- Review and filter out “brand” traffic. Most websites get a lot of Google traffic from people who’ve typed some version of the name of their company as their search query. You’ll want to note whether those visitors have significantly increased or decreased. If you receive fewer visitors for your brand, this could be caused by a decrease in marketing and advertising. Once you make note of the brand traffic, you’ll want to filter it out so you can study actual keyword traffic, which is what real SEO traffic consists of.
- Analyze which keyword phrases have had a significant decrease in visitors. Now that you’ve filtered out the brand traffic, you should be able to see the keyword phrases that are bringing you the most traffic. If you have lots, you may want to view 100 phrases at a time rather than the default of just 10. Are there lots of keyword phrases that seem to bring far fewer visitors over the last few months as compared to last year at the same time? You may also notice some that are bringing significantly more visitors.
- Do a quick Google search for the phrases. If you’re not seeing any pages from your site on the first page in Google, it may or may not be a clue (given the fact that everyone sees different search results) but it is definitely a cause to investigate further. If a page from your site does show up fairly high in the list, it could just be that fewer people are searching for that phrase now as compared to before. Or it could be that your listing isn’t quite what the searcher is looking for based on your title and descriptive snippet. There might also be other results for the keyword phrase that have images or video embedded whereas yours doesn’t. Or there might be local map results showing up that make your result less appealing.
- Review the landing page for the keyword phrase that lost traffic. Is there any obvious reason why it’s not bringing in as many visitors as it used to? Does it even exist anymore? Did it change substantially at some point during the year? Did it get buried deeper into the site architecture for some reason? Is the content duplicated from other pages within your site or contained on other websites? Were there links pointing to it at some point that no longer are? Does the copy read naturally, or are there a few extra instances of the keyword phrase than really makes sense to a person?
- Review your long-tail traffic. Since the end of April and early May 2010 a few large sites lost a substantial amount of traffic for keyword phrases that brought small numbers of visitors individually, but in aggregate they made up a lot of website traffic. You’ll want to filter your keywords to those that have only a few visitors (even just 1) and see if there are significantly fewer of those than previously. If this is the case, Google has gone on record stating that they’re doing a better job at sending long-tail traffic to more meaningful and relevant pages than they used to. Which means you’ll have to go above and beyond what you’re currently doing if you want to get that long-tail traffic back.
- Decide if you’re dealing with a search engine penalty. For drastic drops, in the rare cases where it’s not a technical issue, you’re most likely dealing with a penalty. You can check your Google Webmaster Tools account to see if there is a notification of a penalty, but they don’t usually bother to tell you. Still, search engine penalties are much rarer than people think. In fact, most website owners know what they’ve done wrong when they have a search engine penalty. There are some cases, however, where they may have been duped by a less than scrupulous “SEO” company. The penalties I’ve seen seem to occur on sites that have no redeeming value because they have the same products and content that can be found on many other sites (often ones owned by the same company), plus they are deeply entrenched in massive link farms. It’s likely that they are also hosting part of the link farm on their own site in the form of a link directory. If this is what you find, you may be better off to start from scratch rather than trying to salvage the penalized domain.
I hope these steps help you diagnose your own loss of traffic.
Best SEO India – Best SEO Services India(BSSI) is an top SEO company offering SEO & internet marketing services to UK, USA, Canada based clients. Get your website on #1 rank in Google, Yahoo, MSN.
When shopping for Canadian auto insurance quotes,the first step is to understand the coverage level. Then, assess what type of coverage you really need. Also, if you have more than one car, your chances of getting a lower rate of insurance will be quite good. It is best to get all of your insurance policies from one company only.
Web Design Chennai – We are the leading web design company in Chennai.. we are offers in web design, web development ,SEO,Website Designing and web hosting.
ipage review – Read UnBiased iPage reviews of real customers before hosting your domains.
link building services – Award winning SEO Link Building Services. Vertical Measures is top rated Internet marketing company helping businesses. get more website traffic via higher search engine rankings, link building, social media, local search, and search engine optimization.
Link Building services – we are the leading link building services providers,One-way and Reciprocal Link building,In affordable Prices, Quality and Satisfaction is guaranteed.
XoftSpySE download – XoftSpySE Anti-Spyware 7.0 is easy to install and use. Its common sense interface puts the full features of this powerful software in your hands. You simply choose the scan you want and XoftSpySE Anti-Spyware 7.0 goes to work.
Web Design Company Chennai – Visuals India – Web design and Development Company Chennai and SEO company. If you need our services then visit visualindia.com .
FDA Regulation – The food and drug administration has rules and regulations that medical device company’s must comply to in order to sell the device in the market
Android apps developer – Oreeka Online has expert team of Android Programmers for high-end Android application development. We have highly skilled team of Developers who have the skills to create bespoke mobile apps.
Satellite Phone Rental – Satellite phone rental with Cellhire global coverage in remote destinations through out the world. Cellhire offer Iridium satellite phones and Thuraya satellite for rental.
Website Design – Pomdesign provides web design and website design solutions at cheap rate. Get nice and excellent web design for your websites. Tel:(UK) 0845 2577 187
Cheap Website Hosting – Top 10 Web Hosting — Best Web Hosts 2010.
Quickbooks Hosting – Access Quickbooks Anytime, Anywhere – NovelAspect is a trusted leader in Quickbooks Web Hosting Services. They are the most reliable, and fully-licensed desktop QuickBooks hosting provider. Their QuickBooks Hosting provides unlimited remote user capability and every feature available on the local PC.
Article Source : http://www.highrankings.com
Change of Address Form – We provide the best free change of address service on the web helping make people’s move to a new home a lot easier.
London Masters Online Marketing – The Hult International Business School offers a top ranked one-year U.S. MBA with world-class faculty and a unique action-learning curriculum, in three world-class cities – Boston, Dubai and Shanghai.
Web Design Services :- Pixelsmedia Technologies provides innovative web design services, that combines creativity along with clear business concepts. Web Design Services are tailored to meet your core needs, without following a generic approach.