Website starts ranking on Google then always drops - Targeted for Australia but most traffic from U.S - Bounce Rate at 94.49% - HELP!

[AlphaDigital2]

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your time.

During the past 8 months I have been working on this website which is a .com.au . I have fully optimised the website which is targeting Brisbane in Australia and I have setup everything (Sitemaps, Geo location on WMT, Fetched as Google etc..) However the website just does not want to rank at all.

I know that the previous SEO company were not too good but since then I have disavowed all unnatural links, we have moved the hosting to a new company and the website content has been updated.

Only recently the Website has started ranking for it's brand name (not even in top of Google) and whenever a keyword starts ranking above the Top 50 of Google it suddenly drops again.

The other issues is that even if I have setup the website to target Australia the majority of traffic comes from the U.S.

Last month out of the 127 Session - 85 from United States - 29 from Australia - 3 Brazil - 2 India - 2 Italy - 1 Canada etc...

Because of this the website has a Bounce rate of 95%.

If you would have any advice, tips or recommendations that I could do to try and fix this it would be much appreciated.

I suppose we can consider this as some kind of penalisation - potentially due to the past work and issues that occurred before the business became our client but I am not sure what more I can do to stop the wrong traffic and improve the rankings.

Thanks for your help.

Lyam

[NHA_DistanceLearning]

Hi Lyam,

You say that what you're seeing is probably penalization. If so, it's possible that there are issues to be addressed in your Google Webmaster Tools. You might have fixed most of them, but did you also file a reconsideration request with Google on the manual action page in your WMT? It might just be that Google's systems still have your URL flagged as penalized, even though it's clean again.

About the sessions that originate from abroad: from what traffic sources do you get these visits? Are they all organic and direct traffic, or is there affiliate, ppc, e-mailtraffic among them?

[PaddyDisplays]

I think there is a good chance that you getting a Bot crawling your site and thats were most of you high bounce rate is coming from.  As Bas said try and narrow down where the us traffic is coming from.

I have had problems with bingads bot giving me huge bounce rates, but it was easy to spot as they all come from one town in the US same browser, 100% bounce rate.

[WilliamKammer]

Same here. For me, any clients that are running BingAds get a few thousands bot hits like this. The hits aren't categorized as PPC, but this is the most prominent correlation I could find. Same thing with 100% bounce and all from one city.

[KarlBantleman]

You're not using a geo redirect are you?

If not, then it does seem like you have had an algorithm penalty (assuming there isn't a manual notice) on WMT.