Is a New Visits ratio of 39% a really bad thing?
-
I do a lot of work for a large estate agency based almost solely in London. They get a considerable amount of traffc and all other stats, on the whole, are always positive. The only thing that is decreasing regularly is the percentage of new traffic.
My understanding of user behaviour for this market is that no one in their right mind would make an enquiry or arrange a booking without a) looking at the property at least twice themeselves (once to before the enquiry and once before a viewing) and b) more than likely show a partner. Plus the site is well laid out and useful so I believe users are favouring our site over the comparison sites.
So questions:
-
Should I be panicing
-
What is the most efficent way of increasing new visits?
Things to note:
The HTML titles throughout the site are a bit of a mess - key word rich but too long and inconsistent. Could this be a contributing factor to the CTR?
Also in the past month we appeared in over 4k different queries but our non branded impressions are down 22%. Could more concise, less keyword stuffed HTML titles help this? Do I need to look at the page titles to ensure that they contain the exact phrases that are in decline?
Any help will be greatly appreciated!
-
-
Many thanks! I have tried with custom segments in the past but got confused and gave up. In doing this it has helped me clarify how I evaluate the data.
My keyword ranking have dropped and it is the perfect incentive to give them a kick up the behind to right some new content! I will also talk to them about a link building budget as currently their investment is far too low for a site of this size.
Thanks again for your help very much appreciated.
-
I don't think a decreasing new visits ratio is a bad thing. One might be able to spin it as a good thing.
Are you viewing this traffic as a whole? Because if so, it may not be an accurate representation. From the sounds of it, this is a big brand that you're working for. As such, a lot of your traffic is likely to come through branded terms. A decreasing new visits ratio for branded terms is not a bad thing - if anything, an increase in traffic and returning visitors would show that the brand is being trusted. In the real estate industry, this could mean that people are liking the listings on your site and are revisiting on a regular basis.
First thing I would do would be to set up some custom segments in Analytics (if this is what you're using, apologies if not). They're quite simple to do. I would set up 3 segments for organic search: brand, non-brand and not provided.
In your dashboard, click advanced segments and then the new custom segment button. Starting with brand, start with a "Include: Keyword" variable and type in your brand name. I'd add a couple of "OR" variables too, such as mispellings of the brand or nicknames/short names it has. Then insert an "AND" statement and select "medium", typing in organic in the field. You now have a segment of organic traffic purely for brand keywords.
For non-brand, do exactly the same, except for instead of "including" the brand keywords, you "exclude" them. I'd also exclude [not provided], add that as an "OR" variable.
For not provided itself, it's very simple - you just need one "Include:keyword" variable, at which point you type in [not provided].
With these 3 segments, you'll be able to see the new visitor rate of each one. I think this would give a more accurate representation of things. As mentioned earlier, I don't think a decreasing new visitor rate for brand traffic is a bad thing at all. For your non-brand keywords, a decreasing rate may suggest a decrease in your SEO visbility for some keywords. Sounds like you might be suspecting this to be the case. However, again, if traffic was still increasing I wouldn't be too worried. But a decreasing new visitor rate for non-brand search is perhaps more of a worry than brand search, so it's important to segment the traffic (in my opinion).
I think title tags do have a decent part in contributing click through rate, as does the meta description. I think it would be wise to clean these up and optimise them if you think they could be improved. Having said that, if impressions are down by 22%, it's probably your visibility that's affected, not the CTR.
Have you been monitoring your keyword rankings. Watching rankings every day can make you go a bit crazy, but it's a great indication of what your SEO visibility would be, which in turn is one of the best ways of getting new visits to your site. You're always going to rank #1 for your brand, so capturing new visits for people searching for london estate agents and similar search terms is what you can influence most. Optimising titles and meta descriptions is a good start, as well as increasing the rankings for some of the terms that offer the most impressions and are related to the business. Off-page factors are equally a big part in increasing this visibility. Not sure what your marketing/link-building strategy is at the moment, but I'd look to do more of that to increase your rankings in tandem with the on-page factors.
Hope this helps!
-
I don't think 39% is a big issue especially in an industry where repeat views are necessary.
One of our websites sells cheap portable ramps and has a high percentage of new visitors, due to the fact that there is no reason to come back (they either buy or don't buy).
Another of our sites sells expensive vintage furniture and has a very low percentage of new visitors. There is far more time spent on the buying process, there are also many visits from interior designers who always come back.
I always think that it is dangerous to look at percentages (especially on low traffic figures). For example if you increase the amount of your new visitors the amount of repeat viewers should also increase therefore your 39% may well stay the same (despite the obvious traffic improvement). Look to increase traffic not percentages.
PPC is a good way to get people to your site. You can advertise on words that people don't currently type in to get to your site, this could cut down on repeat viewers clicking on your adverts.
As to why your rankings have dropped can't comment until you post the site!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do sub-domain visits do not count for website?
It's a common understanding that Google treats sub-domains as different websites. Does that mean visits of sub-domain do not impact website in-terms of ranking or visibility or reputation at Google?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Bad Dates in SERPs, YouTube & Rankings (Nov. 10-18)
We've seen a lot of reports, including Q&A questions, of sites showing bad dates in Google SERPs. I've verified this bug in the wild. There are also reports of bad dates being caused by YouTube embeds, with Google taking the video date instead of the page date. I can also confirm this is happening, although I don't know if it accounts for all of the bad dates. Some people are reporting that these bad dates showing up corresponded with ranking drops. Usually, I would treat that as a coincidence (Google could easily launch an update and have a glitch on the same day), but in some of the reported cases, removing YouTube embeds led to ranking recovery soon after. I can't verify this, but I can't disregard it. There seem to be multiple reports of this recovery. I'm in communication with a Google rep, and they are unaware of any direct connection between a bad date and ranking (such as some kind of QDF effect). I've passed along some data, and they are investigating, but there may have been multiple updates in play that are making for noisy data (even for Google). There did seem to be heavy algorithm flux on November 10th and 18th, with some people speculating the latter spike was a reversal of the former. I have no evidence to support this, but MozCast data and chatter do seem to support both spikes. If you've been affected by this problem and the ranking drops are severe, it's worth temporarily removing YouTube embeds (if feasible). Replace them with direct links (or maybe a linked thumbnail) and have Google re-fetch the page. I can't guarantee it will work, but the risks are low. It's easy to restore the embed. Update (11/22) - Gary Illyes is saying on Twitter that the date problems have been fixed. If you see the proper dates cached, but have not seen rankings recover, then these may be unrelated events.
Algorithm Updates | | Dr-Pete2 -
Anyone else noticing "Related Topics" featured snippet? Is this new?
First time I've seen this type of featured snippet and now have seen it twice in the space of a couple hours. Queries on Google UK desktop: surgical instruments Hawking radiation Is this new? It definitely is for the "surgical instruments" search. Google are highlighting related topics/keywords in bold beneath the usual featured snippet. b261ea5b3279991f8549d20127f8fde3.png
Algorithm Updates | | Ria_0 -
Why would google favour overseas retailers? Really weird results..
Why would google favour results from overseas retailers for queries in the UK? It's weird since most won't ship to the UK and the same products are found at dozens of UK retailers. It's not the case that the overseas sites are necessarily bigger brands or better SEO optimised, so having asked the leading agencies in the UK and them being stumped I was curious if this was something anyone else had seen? Our theory is that this can only be a poorly disguised attempt to drive Adwords.
Algorithm Updates | | predatornutrition0 -
Are all duplicate contents bad?
We were badly hit by Panda back in January 2012. Unfortunately, it is only now that we are trying to recover back. CASE 1:
Algorithm Updates | | Gautam.Jain
We develop software products. We send out 500-1000 word description about the product to various download sites so that they can add to their product listing. So there are several hundred download sites with same content. How does Google view this? Did Google penalize us due to this reason? CASE 2: In the above case the product description does not match with any content on our website. However, there are several software download sites that copy and paste the content from our website as the product description. So in this case, the duplicate content match with our website. How does Google view this? Did Google penalize us due to this reason? Along with all the download sites, there are also software piracy & crack sites that have the duplicate content. So, should I remove duplicate content only from the software piracy & crack sites or also from genuine download sites? Does Google reject all kind of duplicate content? Or it depends on who hosts the duplicate content? Confused 😞 Please help.0 -
How long does it take for a new website to start showing in the SERP'S
I launched my website about 6 weeks ago. It was indexed fairly quickly. But it is not showing up in the Google SERP. I did do the on page SEO and followed the best practise's for my website. I have also been checking webmaster tools and it tells me that there is no errors with my site. I also ran it through the seomoz on page seo analyzer and again no real big issues. According to seomoz I had 1 duplicate content issue with my blog posts, which i corrected. I understand it takes some time, but any ideas of how much time? And f.y.i it's a Canadian website. So it should be a lot easier to rank as well. Could my site be caught in the Google 'sandbox effect' ? Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | CurtCarroll0 -
Google spitting out old data as new alerts
Am I just unlucky or are others seeing this too? I have several google alerts. For the past 6 months, google keeps sending crap along with good stuff. its a bit like their search results. There are three types of Alerts they send that I'm not impressed with. 1. Alerts that are from unintelligible splogs that take real news stories and rewrite them with unintelligible garbage that makes no sense at all. Sometimes, they serve up new alerts from the same splogs I saw several months ago, that I felt sure they would have zapped by now. 2. Old stories, that have been around for months. I just received one that was from January, from TechDirt, a big site that must get a huge amount of attention from google. 3. Irrelevant stories because they love to show how smart they are by splitting my alert keyword text into multiple words, but it gives useless results. This is the kind of stuff that crappy search engines like AltaVista used to do. Is google reverting to the childhood of search with all these changes?
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
When Google crawls and indexes a new page does it show up immediately in Google search - "site;"?
We made changes to a site, including the addition of a new page and corresponding link/text changes to existing pages. The changes are not yet showing up in the Google index (“site:”/cache), but, approximately 24 hours after making the changes, The SERP's for this site jumped up. We obtained a new back link about a couple of weeks ago, but it is not yet showing up in OSE, Webmaster Tools, or other tools. Just wondering if you think the Google SERP changes run ahead of what they actually show us in site: or cache updates. Has Google made a significant SERP “adjustment” recently? Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | richpalpine0