How to recover my traffic? How to make a boring subject interesting?

[MortgagesByMark]

Hi all, your feedback would be hugely appreciated.

I've had a mortgage website for about a year and half now that I've painstakingly filled with relevant, informative content. I've seen my traffic ranking in Alexa go from > 14,000,000 a year ago to right around 1,000,000 today, but I got hit really hard in the recent Google updates.

I lost about 60% of my traffic at the end of April and have been at a loss as to what to do about it. I wasn't doing anything shady to generate traffic, so my guess is that some of my backlinks were discounted in the update, so my site got hit in the rankings.

Now I'm really trying to rework my site to get my traffic back. What would you suggest? I feel almost like I'm starting at square one again because all my efforts thus far got hammered in the updates.

Currently I'm updating and reworking some of my content to format it better, make the site more navigable, and better optimize the content for the search engines. I've also hired a virtual assistant to manage my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts to help build traffic that way. I'm keeping up with blogging on a regular basis as well, but it's such a big time suck when I'm trying to get loans funded full time as well.

Also, mortgages is kind of a boring subject. Who the heck would want to come back to my site every day and read about mortgages? How can I make the subject interesting and fun so that people want to come back on regular basis?

I'm new here and your thoughts are most welcome! Feel free to unleash the tough criticisms too! My site is mortgagesbymark.com if you'd like to take a look at it.

Thanks!

[VanadiumInteractive]

Hey Mark; Content and traffic is a great thing but as a business owner I'm guessing the end result is to convert that traffic into a lead. How is your conversion? What would it be worth to you to increase that by 10-20 percent? Pictures can say a 1000 words, your site is very textual and informative but has little focus on visual queues for segmenting your audience and cleary providing your offering. What action do you want your audience to take? And how well do you present that in all your pages? Once I find your content, How do you take me from reading it to interacting with you? Unless you have that dialed in, spending your energy and money on attracting traffic will result in just that, traffic. My initial thought would be to enhance the home page and back pages with a conversion strategy, and once that is in place to continue your traffic efforts

[cbielich]

Without going to your site simply taking a look at your back link data at http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.mortgagesbymark.com%2F you might being having a SERP issue. You have links from your own site but many of your one way links from other sites are low in DA and PA. Getting quality sites backlinking to your page is where you will see a major increase.

I too suffered a lose from Panda and recent Google updates. I lost about 75% of my traffic. Even though I had a quality site my rankings tanked. In reasearching my backlinks I noticed the DA and PA of most of them were pretty low. I then looked at my compettores and they were beating me in that area. Since then all I have done was work on establishing relationships with partnering sites, getting them to add links back to my site and just establish a rep with them. Since then I have almost completely recovered from the lose.

Back-links are key, don't do Black or Grey hat because that will bite you in the end. Work on quality links from other sites. Remember quality not quantity. I still catch myself optimizing my site for SEO rather than the user. Change your way of thinking and watch it work

[MortgagesByMark]

Great comments, thank you! I recently just happened to start reworking some pages with conversion in mind, so it's good to reminded of the importance of that.

[MortgagesByMark]

Thanks Cesar, I'll definitely check into that. Sounds like you got back on your feet quickly - right on!

[cbielich]

Yes it was scary. I went from over 5k a month in adsense to 2k. But work hard on establishing rep with other and links just come to you

[KeriMorgret]

I'd like to address the "boring" comment. I'm in the middle of buying a house right now. I don't need a mortgage site to be cute or have fuzzy animals or be funny. I want the information to be clear and understandable. I want to know if I should care about which title company I select, or if I should just go with the default title company that my real estate agent selects.

I'm looking for useful information that is well-written, has a lot of content, links out to the appropriate government sites where I can go for the full legalese, and will help me at two in the morning when I can't sleep and am wondering something and I can't call up the loan agent or I want a second opinion.

I may not come back in six months after I have my house and my loan is all settled. But if I remember your site as being a great site where I could get the information I need, I'll recommend it to someone who is talking about buying a house and needing a mortgage.

[MortgagesByMark]

Great comment, thank you Keri! The subject of mortgages is not the most fascinating to most people, but hopefully I can at least keep it as interesting as possible while still providing great info. Thanks!