Ranking well for main key terms but site traffic has dropped sharply?

[TimHolmes]

Hello All,

Just a quick question.

Since the penguin update our site www.caravanguard.co.uk has seen some pretty fluctuating movement in Google, many of our key terms dropped over night, but over the last few weeks they have slowly started to move back up the rankings.

The bizarre thing is despite the recover in rankings our unique traffic has taken a fairly large whack in numbers. Seasonality? Weather? ( it's been nice in the UK for a change)

I can only assume the longer tail terms are taking more time to recover. I have tried to look into our back link profile and have noticed a little too much in terms concise keyword targeting, How do you go about changing these terms and removing the really bad links (struggling to identify the worst cases) on totally irrelevant sites or poor directories.

Put in place before I started here

Any help truly appreciated.

Regards

Tim

[DeptAgency]

Hi Tim,

Do you have Google Analytics installed? If so it should be possible to find out what's happening! This is what I'd do:

1. Get the 100 best performing keywords for january - march.

2. Get the 100 best performing keywords for the past two weeks.

3. see which keywords you used to get traffic on but currently don't get traffic on.

4. if you still rank for these keywords, it's probably because of search volumes and if you don't rank first page for these keywords it's because of your rankings. (probably).

Obviously it's a bit more tricky if your long tail rankings only dropped slightly. If that's the case you could try to find out for which keywords you used to get >10% of the search volume in visitors. It's higly likely that you used to rank top 3 for these words. If you rank 6th or 7th for these keywords now you probably lost some ground there.

Also you can checkout the search engine optimization feature in Google Analytics in case you have GA linked to your webmastertools.

This is why it's important to document your rankings over time (on lot's of keywords). You could use a ranktracker for that.

Best of luck!

Sven Witteveen

Expand Online

[TimHolmes]

Thanks for the insight Sven,

I have a had a look over the stats for the main keywords in our analytics and there is certainly a downward trend for our main keywords. I have been keeping track of the Ranking for our main terms via the rankings tool on SEO moz - we dropped as low as 10 from around position 5 since the Penguin update. In the last ranking results we had climbed back up to 8.

According to Google Queries we have had no impressions or clicks for our main terms for the last three days - I am hoping this is due to it needing time to catch up.... otherwise something is very wrong.

Due to the seasonality of our market, as soon as the weather is nice people go out in their motorhomes and caravans, this will also affect traffic to a degree.

NOTE - just looked in webmaster tools - this does only go up to the 27th of May not to the 30th so a couple of days behind.

[EGOL]

The bizarre thing is despite the recover in rankings our unique traffic has taken a fairly large whack in numbers. Seasonality? Weather? ( it's been nice in the UK for a change)

What rankings are you looking at?  There are image rankings, blog rankings, news rankings.  I'd bet on images.

[TimHolmes]

I have been looking at the organic keyword search position rankings on Google. I think