Normal that Home Page Generating Less than 4% Of Organic Traffic?

[Kingalan1]

Greetings MOZ Community:

My firm operates www.nyc-officespace-leader.com, a commercial real estate brokerage in New York City.

Prior to the first Penguin update in April 2012, our home page used to receive about 10% or 600 of total organic visits. After the first Penguin was launched by Google organic traffic to the home dropped to maybe 5% or 200 visits per month.

Since May of this year, it appears we have been penalized by Penguin 4.0 and are attempting to recover. Now our home page only generates about 140 organic visits per month, or less than 4% of organic traffic.

Our home enjoyed  good conversion rate, so this drop in traffic is a real loss.

Does this very low level of traffic to the home page indicate something abnormal? Dropping from 10% to less than 4% is a major decline. Should we take specific steps regarding the home page like enhancing the content?

Thanks, Alan

[SilverDoor]

Hi Alan,

Sorry to hear that this has happened.

The first thing I suggest you do is some detailed analysis of your homepage.

Here are the things I propose you look into:

1. The overall link profile, including internal and external links. Take all relevant action to remove any external links which may be detrimental to your rankings (e.g. comment spamming, directories etc). Also, look at how many internal links point to the homepage. Internal links tell search engines which pages you deem to be the most important.
2. Look at the on-page content. Is it unique, high-quality, relevant content which provides value to the user? If not then change it.
3. Ensure that all basic SEO elements are implemented and fully optimised. All metadata, H-tags, strong tagging etc.

Obviously, the most important thing to do before you make any changes is to benchmark all current stats (rankings, traffic etc.). That way, you will be able to efficiently measure the impact of any changes you make.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks

SilverDoor

[ProductPearson]

Pretty much what SilverDoor said, but also ensure that you are adding some regular content to the site, as looking at your site results in Google, not much content has been added this year at all, regular content additions will usually help you maintain those rankings and traffic, even if it is a simple blog attached to the site.

http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog is looking great, but has only been updated a few times this year, and these days you are competing with sites that add content on a daily or even hourly basis.

[Kingalan1]

Hi SilverDoor:

Thanks for your feedback!!

In April an SEO firm requested removal of links from 120 low quality domains. Some voluntarily removed links and we filed a disavow with Google for the rest.

We have not looked at internal link structure. In fact the site does not use many text links.

Would it make sense to create text links when relevant from other URLs and point them to home page?

Content on the home page could be improved and I intend to rewrite it.

In your experience, what is the normal percentage of new organic inquiries that the home page should generate? 5%, 10%??? That will at least provide some guideline on what is normal.

Thanks,

Alan

[Kingalan1]

Thanks, Searchbuzz!!!

That is interesting!!

We have focused updating the user interface and have done so about 6 times this year. As a result we have reduced the amount of new content (blog posts, updates of static pages).

So if I now focus on upgrading and adding content, this should result in a bounce up??

Thanks,
Alan

[ProductPearson]

Yes, absolutely adding more content should help keep freshness - just be sure you have a sitemap in your Google Webmaster Tools so Google is kept updated on how often you are updating the pages on your site.

Also, just as a side-note, making visual changes to your site that changes the source code by a large amount can sometimes have a negative (temporary) effect on your search engine rankings. As you have done this multiple times this year, this could also be the reason for your traffic drops. Find the optimum design and stick to it, and focus on content.

[MoosaHemani]

If you are not sure that this action is actually a penguin attack or not then you probably should get in to your analytics and see on what dates your website receives a major dip in rankings and compare it with the algo updates… if you see the similarities in dates you probably are a victim of it.

You can also check your Google webmaster tool to see if you receive any manual action penalty in GWT.

If you are sure this is a penguin attack and not panda or any other update then it is most probably because of the links that point back to your site. Here are some of the ideas that you should consider as important.

-          Audit your website links and see which of them harmful links are. You can use software like Link Risk and Link Detox to see how many harmful links you have in your link profile.

-          Remove as many bad links as possible

-          Re develop your content (if possible)

-          Create new good and high quality links that points back to the site.

-          Submit a disavow file

Crate new content and link on continuous basis. This will take a bit of time for your website to start receiving that organic traffic back but continuous effort will take you to that point again.

Hope this helps!

[SwimsuitsDirect.com]

Do you have links back to your homepage on all of your pages?

[Kingalan1]

Interesting question.

The "Home" was removed from the top menu in June. Now the logo on the upper left of the header on every page still links to the home page. But is this sufficient? Did we kill valuable links by removing the "Home" item in the top menu?

The body text in the hundreds of pages does not have may links. Would it be useful to add text links on those pages back to the home page?

Thanks, Alan

[Kingalan1]

Hi Moosa:

Actually we were hit by Penguin in April 2012, and then by Panda 4.0 (for thin content) in late May of this year.

Regarding the Penguin issue, we identified bad links, requested removal and filed a disavow with Google listing the domains that refused to remove links. We are also re-writing as much content as possible. In terms of creating links, I have been instructed that the best way to do so is to create high quality onsite content that others will link to. So I am hoping we are on the right track.

But getting back to my original question, I don't know why the home page has been punished disproportionately.

Thanks, Alan