Higher rankings, low traffic

[Midleton]

Hello There,

My question is the following:

How come my rankings are much higher than when I started with the optimization process (1 year ago) but my organic traffic is lower compared to the previous year (it didn't increase at all)?

NB  - I haven’t received any penalization and the keywords I am targeting are definitively searched and are the most important for my company.

Thanks a lot

[PurpleGriffon]

Hi,

Have your impressions increased in Google Webmaster Tools? I assume they have and if so it may simply be that your titles and descriptions are not enticing enough for searchers to click on.

Generally, increased rankings equates to increased traffic. Are you definitely sure your rankings have increased? Try searching your keywords in an Incognito window in Google Chrome without being logged in to any Google accounts and see if you appear. If you don't then the rankings your monitoring probably aren't the actual rankings you're seeing.

Hope this helps.

Gaz

[Midleton]

Yes my impressions increased. I daily check my rankings with incognito window in chrome and mozilla and they reflect the actual rankings. I forgot to mention that lately even my direct as well as referral traffic went down compared to the previous year. I checked also my index status and all the URLs I want to be indexed are actually indexed in google.

I can't find any reasonable solution

[matbennett]

If your direct traffic is down as well, this could be demand issue.

A couple of years ago we did some work on a website centred around a technology that was going our of fashion fast. We got great results in terms of rankings and additional exposure, but the overall traffic barely stayed level. The issue there was simply falling demand.

Changes in demand are often most noticeable as part of seasonal cycles.  Comparing to the same period last year is often useful. Tools like Google trends can indicate whether there is an underlying trend.

[paints-n-design]

I would prefer some more details- which keywords, why do you chose them, higher rankings means what? Two, Three or 20 Positions? How often is it searched and how much klicks do you have. Whats the Keyword trend?

Maybe the chosen Keyword is wrong, maybe the topic isn't as hot as last year, maybe its an ugly search snippet ...