Any ideas why organic traffic seems to have hit a plateau?

[shabbirun]

I run an eCommerce store and have a decent number of quality links pointing to it(which is still growing). It's been 6 months since I started it, and I'm getting between 100-120 organic visits per day right now. I've had a few more quality guest post/infographic links, and I'm also focusing on optimizing individual pages, but my traffic still seems to have plateaued.

I'm beginning to doubt that more links is the answer. All of my content is unique(no manufacturer descriptions) and I'm still being outranked by sites that have spammier link profiles and copy/paste descriptions.

Any thoughts?

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Shabbir,

Without digging deeper, I would like to say that your website is relatively new and please have a look at your competitors' websites and the time they have been online. You can use archive.org for the purpose. New websites can take time to gain the traction and 6 months is very little that too when you say, its an e-commerce website hence, cut throat competition. Its good that you have been getting 100 -120 organic visits per day. If you continue the way you have been doing, you should be in a good shape soon.

As you know, content that is unique, highly relevant, useful to the visitor and serves the purpose of their visit will do the magic for you. Please don't worry about websites that use low quality or scrapped content ranking at the top. Its not going to work for long (but can greatly depends on the kind of authority they have like DA and PA). In general, search engines have higher tolerance levels for highly authoritative websites.

I would like to conclude by saying, please do not worry as your website is very young and concentrate your efforts to improve the quality of your content, you can try to include some small videos and images (on the product pages) related to the products' functionality, features, USPs etc..improve the stickiness of your website (make your visitors hang out for reasonable amount of time on your site), earn links rather than building them desperately (I am sure, you will never do this as I read your blog). Try to build citations to your site from good websites and you know the rest.

All the best to you.

Devanur Rafi

[DennisSeymour]

is this a local ecom site? You will definitely face local classified ads, spammy competitors etc and most of the time, they will outrank you. It's just the way local is for those outside the USA side.

The good thing is, most of these competitors just stop spamming and the real clients that eventually find you will be loyal to you. Just continue what you are doing, if possible build a social community as well. Try to get some more local coverage (if you are indeed targeting local) and look at your webmaster tools. See where you need to improve.

Finally, test a PPC campaign. You'll see a whole lot more data vs just waiting for WMT data. You can get ahead earlier and improve your converts.

Good luck Shabbir

[DougRoberts]

Hi Shabbir

As you've encountered, as you rise up through the rankings it becomes harder and harder to displace those ahead of you.It's a bit like running a marathon starting at the back of the field. You can get to a point where no matter how hard you run, you're never going to catch the guys who started before you.

Ranking for product pages can be insanely tough - even with unique product descriptions...

Brute force link building can only take you so far and increasingly you've got to watch out that your backlink profile isn't going to come back to bite you.

Without knowing what niche you're in it's hard to provide specific advice, but here are some thoughts:

1. You're getting traffic, but how much of these are new visitors and how many are returning visitors? What can you do to get more of those visitors to engage and take action. How can you turn these visitors into loyal returning customers? This can be difficult if you're selling a commodity on price alone.

2. Go broad and think of your long-tail. Instead of focusing on the head-terms that become increasingly difficult to improve, think about growing your long tail by adding content to your site. This can for example, take the form of Frequently asked questions, how-to guides, tips etc or other more creative ideas. It's the richness and depth of thiscontent that'll earn you traffic from queries you would never target individually.

Just remember that these pages still have to work hard to move your visitors towards your site's goal and becoming customers.

Your long tail can deliver more traffic than your head-terms combined. The downside is that the commercial intent may not be as strong for some of this traffic so you'll need to work hard to convert this traffic into customers.

3. Instead of targeting those people who are looking for your products, write content for people who are trying to find answers to the problems that your products solve.

4. Guest blogging just for links doesn't really help you establish your site as an authority and you're missing a trick if your not getting your content in front of your potential customers. Where do your customers hang-out? Can you write guest articles that will attract traffic to your site rather than "just a link". You've got to understand what you're audience is interested in and resist the urge just to tell them what you want to tell them!

Hope this helps,

[shabbirun]

Hey Doug,

Thanks for such an in-depth answer. Its interesting that you mention the long tail - a lot of my existing traffic is coming from long tail keywords, but like you said, it's hard to convert those visitors.

One thing I can think of to improve the rankings of individual products is to try and funnel link juice from the high-ranking long tail pages to relevant product pages. Do you think that could help?

About 90% of organic traffic is new visitors.

[shabbirun]

Hi Devanur,

Thank you for the encouraging words. Sticking out is actually the hardest part! You need to dig a little into your pockets to do that, so you can get impatient at times

PS - thanks for reading the blog and your kind words, it means a lot!

[ChristopherGlaeser]

About 90% of organic traffic is new visitors.

Are you using Retargeting?  A significant fraction of the visitors to your site may be interested in a purchase but surfing is easily distracted.  Retargeting can be a cost-effective way to get their attention again.

Best,
Christopher

[Devanur-Rafi]

You are most welcome my friend. Improving the stickiness, as you said is a bit hard but if we can make it happen, then nothing like it. Let me share a personal experience here. Few years back, I had a client with an e-commerce site. The avg. time spent on the site was around 1 min and few seconds (sorry do not remember exactly). He wanted to improve it. When I saw the product pages, for example, a page related to a coffee making machine, the page had nothing but only the product image, description, features and a button to place an order. We then took some good videos of the product from Youtube and embedded them on to the page. We also added some related products to the right hand side of the page. We did this to all the product pages of the site and the results were very dramatic. The avg. site engagement times jumped to over 3 mins. Then we also had few clients whom we got gamification implemented on the site, small flash games related to the niche and this also got them amazing results. Site engagement time as you know is very important and Google knows who is sticking around and who is leaving once they click through the search results pages and land on a site.

Coming to your blog, I really enjoyed reading it and I would continue visiting it.

Good luck to you my friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

[DougRoberts]

I don't think you'll see any quick or significant impact linking from your long-tail ranking pages to your individual product (the beauty of the long tail is that you don't need to be so competitive in order to rank) so there's not so much

That's not to say that you shouldn't do it but think about what's best for the visitor.

Consider where the visitor is in the buying cycle and provide content that supports them at the stage/awareness they're at. Do they know what the solution to their problem or need is? Do they understand the benefits of your offerings. Why should they buy from you.

Make sure each of your pages offer an obvious next step. This can be finding out more about your products or is can be a link to buy a particular recommended product.

Don't forget your category pages either. Make sure they have some great unique content too - as well as making it easy for people to find what they're looking for.

Retargeting is a great idea from Christopher, but I'd also say remember the other downloadable assets like buyers guides case-studies, product data sheets (not just the manufacturers produced stuff) - make sure that any such assets are clearly branded, have your website address and active links back to your site.

Again, a lot depends on the kind of products you're selling.