Organic Traffic: Hockey-stick growth followed by slow rampdown of death!

[steve_benjamins]

My site, Site Builder Report, was started last year.

Months 1 - 6 saw modest organic traffic growth.
Months 6 - 9 saw explosive organic traffic growth.
Months 9 - 12 have seen a steady decrease in organic traffic.

(I've attached a graph for visualizing this)

The site has not changed much over this time. In fact, in the last 3 months, I've done two things to try to get organic traffic trending upwards again:

1. Increased the amount of long-form articles on the site (from 1 new article every 3 weeks to 1 new article every week)
2. Fixed approxately 150 five hunded (500) errors in Google Webmaster Tools three weeks ago (converted them to 404s)

Neither fix has really been able to change the trend (although perhaps it's too early to tell with the fixing of errors).

Does this downtrend warrant concern? It's having significant business effects- would hiring an SEO consultant be the next step for reversing this trend? Any thoughts?

GeYyuvA

[Kara.Wallace]

Hi Steven,

My guess would be you are seeing the downtrend, because of the season.

Here is the data I pulled from Google Trends for "hockey stick" - as you can see, the peaks tend to be in December and January for the year.

My guess things will be slow until next year when the season picks back up.

Hope this helps.

Mike

[vmialik]

Hi Steven,

How are your rankings have they changed?

[steve_benjamins]

Thanks Mike, sorry the post may be a bit unclear. I meant "Hockey Stick" as a metaphor.

The website actually targets keywords such as "website builders", "website builder reviews"

[steve_benjamins]

Hi Vladim! I'm not sure I know what you mean- I attached a graph that might help visualize how the rankings have changed over time

[vmialik]

I thought your graph displayed traffic and not rankings, how are you SERPs did they drop? Or are you still ranking in the same position for your keywords?

Because if the rankings are the same, it could be (I know generally this gets sorted out within first few months) but could be the issue of google still trying to figure out where to rank you: http://www.linkbuildr.com/reasons-why-new-pages-rank-well-then-drop/

[Kara.Wallace]

... killing me Steven ; )

It is really tough to say; however, I typed "website builder reviews" into Google Trends and it looks like there was a drop in searches for that terminology in March, which would correspond to what I am seeing on your graph.

Mike