Organic traffic still down 9 months after redesign

[EGOL]

Listenin' to this right now...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWvOY3NdWvk

[RyanKent]

lol! I was expecting maybe Survivor - Eye of the Tiger.

[Francisco_Meza]

csmith, you just got a great site review and FREE. Egol is right, you are competing with the savages. That's like trying to compete for the word "car insurance" or "real estate". I have a small site which ships cars overseas and I am launching a new campaign to compete in "container shipping". I am in the process of hiring our a couple link builders because I know that's a very competitive field, but not as competitive as yours.

EGOL, I'm going to watch that movie now. I can see the similarity of cannibals. Call it cut throat marketing!

[csmithal]

Wonderful reply, EGOL. I am very inspired - I hear 'getting stronger' in the background.

Correct you are about the competitiveness of this space - and we have actually recently had a huge competitor enter the space for our Amazon River cruises.) We are challenged with a lean budget, and I am a one-man e-commerce show.

I think you are right - it's time to go back to basics w/ the term-targeting grader. Solid suggestions on the UI as well.

Question: To your analytics point, what is the best way to determine if the long-tail search volume has dropped? I'm trying to think of the best way to pull this in Google Analytics.

Thanks again for your inspirational post and insight.

[csmithal]

Hello Ryan. Thanks for participating in helping me figure this out. You are correct - competition in our space has really ramped up in the last year as we fight for the last bit of consumers' disposable income. Also, there has been a steady decline year-over-year in travel-related search terms, according to Google Insights.

RE: the robots.txt. On the form pages - we actually do NOT have a customer log-in area (planned for an upcoming improvement), so that's why I had them blocked by robots - as a safeguard. Do you think I would be better off just deleting these nodes that Drupal generates from the forms? I had been leaving them there because I wanted to have the historic data on hand, but it seems to be doing more harm than good.

Also, how do you so quickly identify the 302 redirect? Our DNS controls are administered by parent company's support, so I'll need some "proof" to get this error corrected.

Finally, any tips on pulling specific reports/tools to identify where a drop in long-tail has occurred?

Thanks again for your insight.

[csmithal]

Magento,

Thanks for your input. Linkbuilding is one piece of the puzzle I've not had the budget for....Any recommendations for services? You are welcome to PM me offline.

Cheers

[RyanKent]

how do you so quickly identify the 302 redirect?

There are many tools which can perform this function. Since you are here at SEOmoz it is likely you have the MOZbar installed. Navigate to http://ietravel.com then click the Analyze Page button and select Page Attributes then scroll to the bottom. You will see the 302 header code.

I did not look any further but whomever fixes this issue should not simply resolve this one redirect. They should examine all the redirects to ensure no other 302s are in use.

Do you think I would be better off just deleting these nodes that Drupal generates from the forms?

I would not suggest deleting anything which offered a value to you or your site's visitors. If you know the issue will be resolved in the future, my suggestion would be to leave things as-is and focus your efforts on other areas.

any tips on pulling specific reports/tools to identify where a drop in long-tail has occurred?

I am still searching through SEO tools trying to find the best ones for various tasks. I don't have any suggestions here but hopefully others may share their experiences.

[ShaMenz]

Hi Carlton,

Awesome answers from everyone here!

I just wanted to add that it appears there is only the one 302 redirect that has been incorrectly placed, but of course it is an important one as 302 redirects do not pass link value, so any external site that happens to have linked to your non-www domain will not be adding value to your link profile.

Also, this page http://www.ietravel.com/central-south-america, although appearing to be fine when viewed in the browser, is returning a 500 Error for crawlers (Internal Server Error). You will need to get your tech people to sort this out for you.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[RyanKent]

Sha? Do you have a tool which scans all pages on a website looking for redirects? Or are you using a crawler?

[ShaMenz]

Hey Ryan,

Just using Screaming Frog SEO Spider. It has proven very reliable and quickly identifies errors, server status for every page and much more.

The caveat is that I always check any Status code errors in the browser as there are quite often situations like this where the server is returning a Status error when the page renders fine in the browser.

You just have to be careful to ensure that if you want to scan the root domain you use the non-www URL as usual.

Hope it's useful,

Sha

[RyanKent]

Thanks for the tip! You convinced me.

I had read Pete's article on the topic but it wasn't enough to motivate me to go and download it. Thanks for sharing.

[ShaMenz]

Wow! I'll take that as a compliment

Just don't tell Dr Pete!

Always easier to switch on to something when you see it produce a real result. Glad I could help.

Have a great night,

Sha

[FrontlineMobility]

Flawless roundhouse kick good sir.

[EGOL]

To assess longtail traffic gain or loss, I simply look at the number of keywords that deliver traffic during Month A and compare that to the number of keywords delivering traffic during Month B.

[csmithal]

Sha,

Thank you for the Screaming Frog tool. It showed that several pages - including the HOMEPAGE - were noodp & noydir - I have no idea how this happened. Nevertheless, they have been resurrected.

How much damage do you think my homepage being set as noodp, noydir has done to my rankings?

[csmithal]

EGOL,

Would you be referring to Traffic Sources > Keywords report?
For example,

September 2011:
Search sent 6,200 total visits via 2,427 keywords
Non-paid keywords: 1,147
Paid: 137
Non-branded, Non-paid keywords: 2,168
*The above is an advanced segment I use.

September 2010:
Search sent 7,804 visits via 1,279 keywords.
Non-paid: 1,186
Paid: 3,954
Non-branded, Non-paid keywords: 2,020

This seems to reveal that things may not be as dire as I thought.
I did have less PPC spend July-Sept year-over-year.

[EGOL]

That is a source of the information that I was thinking about.

I use ClickTracks and get a similar report (with a full list of keywords).

[RyanKent]

If I can jump in, I would say no damage at all.

noodp and noydir merely tell Google not to use your site's information for title and meta descriptions rather then your DMOZ or Yahoo directory information. This option has less importance nowadays since Google is more aggressively changing those tags on their own.

[RyanKent]

I like the idea of ClickTrack but unfortunately the product is no longer offered in a standalone form. It has been integrated into a platform designed to assist with e-mail marketing. The packaging solution is expensive (4 figures) and requires a annual contract.

[EGOL]

Yep...  Just saying what I use... other people will probably want to find their own solution.

I was lucky to get the ClickTracks log file analysis program a long time ago... It was really expensive but has served me well for years.

You can get a wimpy log file analysis program at weblogexpert.com ... I use it for simple reports.