After Ranking Drop Continue SEO or Focus on Improving User Experience Instead?

[Kingalan1]

Six months after starting a marketing campaign and spending a lot of money on SEO audits, link removals, wire frames, copywriting and coding my web site  (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) traffic dropped significantly after I launched a new version of my site in early June. Traffic is down about 27%, but most of the traffic from competitive terms is gone and the number of leads (phone calls, form completions) is off by about 70%.

On june 6th an upgraded version of the site with mostly cosmetic changes (narrower header without social media buttons, streamlined conversion forms, new right rail was launched. No URLs were changed, and the text remained mostly the same. But somehow my developers botched up either canonical tags or Robot Text and 175 URLs with very little/no content were indexed by Google. At that point my ranking and traffic. A few days ago a request to remove those pages was made via Google WebmasterTools and now the number of pages indexed is down to 675 rather than the incorrect 850 from before. But ranking, traffic and lead generation have not yet recovered. After spending almost $25,000 over nine months this is rather frustrating.

I might add the site has very few links from incoming domains and those links are not high quality. An SEO audit was performed in February and in April a link removal campaign occurred with about 30 domains agreeing to remove links and a disavow file being submitted for another 70-80 domains that would not agree to remove links.

My SEO believes that we should focus on improving visitor engagement rather that on more esoteric SEO like trying to build incoming links. They think that improving useability will improve conversions and would generate results faster than traditional SEO. Also, they think that improving click through rates, reducing bounce rates will improve ranking by signaling to Google that the site is providing value to visitors.

Does this sound like a reasonable approach? On one hand I don't see how my site with a MOZ domain authority could possibly compete against sites with a high number of quality incoming links and that maybe building a better link profile would yield faster results. On the other hand, it seems logical that Google would reward a site that creates a better user experience.

Any thoughts from the MOZ community???? Does it sound like the recent loss of traffic is due to the indexing of the 175 pages? If so, when should my traffic and ranking return?

Incidentally, these are the steps taken since last November to improve SEO:

• SEO Traffic & Ranking Drop Analysis and Recommendations (included in-depth SEO technical audit and recommendations).

• Unnatural Link Removal Program

• Content Optimization (Audit & Strategy with 20 page keyword matrix)

• CORE (also provided wireframe for /visitor-details pages at no-charge)

• SEO Copywriting for 10 pages

• New wire frames implemented on site on June 6th

• Jump in indexed pages by 175 on June 10th. Google Webmaster Tools removal request made for those low quality pages on June 23rd.

  Thanks, Alan

[wrttnwrd]

Hi Alan,

First, a few things to consider:

1. Did your site actually get hit with a penalty? You talk about removing unnatural links. Was that just to be safe, or something else?
2. If your 1st site revision changed site urls and generated a lot of 404s, without proper redirection, you'd get the exact result you're describing.
3. Did you get new copy written for your 1st site revision? If so, and you didn't write it, take a few sentences from different pages and search for them, in quotes, on Google. Make sure they weren't plagiarized, because that would explain a drop in traffic, too.

All of that said, here's what I'd do:

1. **Definitely **work to improve engagement. Engagement is good for your business anyway, so even if it had zero effect on visits, you'd make existing visitors happier. And, Google at least rewards you because of the secondary effects of a great UX: More attention and citation, more positive reviews, fewer bounce backs, etc. And yes, there's some evidence Google rewards great UX, whether deliberately or as a side effect.

2. Look for lost links and repair them. Use OpenSiteExplorer and get the Top Pages report. Look for all pages that respond with a 404. Put those pages back (if you had that page before), build a page at that location (if you never had that page) or do a 301 redirect from the page URL to a 'real' page (the easiest fix).

3. Check site performance. Did site load speed take a huge hit with the new design?

4. Look at your log files. Go all the way back to before the 1st site relaunch. Compare Googlebot activity on your site from that period to now. What's changed? Is Googlebot getting trapped somewhere? Has crawl traffic dropped?

5. Finally, I wouldn't engage in old-fashioned link building. It's a terrible idea for a site with a low DA. If you want to acquire citations, you're going to have to do it by making customers really happy, offering great information and content, and generally offering a great experience.

I hope this helps. There's no easy answer here. You're going to need to take a very strategic approach, rather than focus on a single tactic, if you're going to make this work.

Ian