Plummeting traffic and rankings for main KWs

[3Amigos]

Hi there mozzers,

You have been so helpful in the past and we'd really appreciate your insights into our problem... we have two data recovery companies in the UK, one has been established for 11 years (dataclinic.co.uk) , the second (datlabs.co.uk) is a subsidiary that's been around for 5 years.

Dataclinic has always ranked highly, usually in the top 1-5 on page one for relevant KWs and towards the end of last year we had traffic of approx 1,800 UK visitors/month - now we're down to only 600. Week on week we're falling and I have started to dread the monitoring checks. We're slipping in the rankings too. As our business relies almost 100% on Google rankings our phones just aren't ringing.

In contrast our subsidiary company datlabs is climbing up the rankings and drawing more traffic - but unfortunately nothing like enough to compensate for the decline in the main company's traffic. We have used the same kinds of marketing strategies for both but have invested more energy into social for dataclinic, and more energy into local for datlabs. I'd say that our strategies have been less than sparkling clean - we've paid for directory links but not with the really spammy directories. We're at a loss to understand what has happened to have had such a dramatic and devastating effect - please help!!

Thanks so much

Sue

[HiveDigitalInc]

A gradual loss in rankings normally means that your competitors are slowly but surely beating you and/or Google is slowly but surely devaluing your links. I would have to look at your analytics to be certain, but the following lends some credence to that theory:

1. Your anchor text is over optimized for the keyword "hard drive recovery", approximately 58% of all of your links have this anchor text.
2. Your anchor text is over optimized for the keyword "data recovery", approximately 56% of your inbound MozRank comes from links with this anchor text.
3. You have a lot of questionable links - likely paid or rented - that Google is either devaluing or penalizing you for.

In addition, your site definitely needs a design refresh if it is going to compete with much more attractively designed sites like http://www.krollontrack.co.uk/

[DanHill]

Hi Sue

Had a quick look at the sites, and did a reverse ip lookup too since I was curious if both were hosted on the same server(which they are not). I then noticed that you need to redirect the following :

http://datlabs.co.uk/

to

http://www.datlabs.co.uk/

You also have a .com version which is identical(as far as I could see from the quick look I had) to your .co.uk site - are you only accepting business from the UK and are you only interested in ranking on Google UK? If the answer is yes then I'd advise you to redirect the .com site to the .co.uk and/or implement canonical tags so that Google knows which site is the primary one.  These kinds of duplicate content issues can and do affect rankings.

Another bit of advice is while I'm not going to get into the whole debate over paid links, I will say that if you use your company/domain name as the anchor text for paid listings in quality directories then you'll be far less likely to be penalised.

If you need some help with the redirect code and implementation just let us know

edit : and take out those keyword meta tags!

[3Amigos]

Hi there Russ

Thanks so much for your reply, you've given me lots of food for thought. You're right, we definitely need to think about how to improve the site design and the UX. It does look very jaded in comparison to some of our larger competitors.

We've recently done some KW research and have identified several new phrases we want to optimise now, which will shift the balance away from the two you highlighted. We're still looking into the best way to link build for these without relying on paid links as we have in the past. I think I'll look for some inspiration from our competitors' link profiles. I've also joined buzzstream today which I think may help.

Thanks once again for taking the time to reply - you've done your good deed for the day!

Sue