Organic Traffic Down March-April 2016
-
Hello MOZ Community!
I have been scouring the web to try and assess what may be responsible for our sites traffic decline which fell off quite suddenly between March and April of this year. While I have heard of two specific things that may have impacted us:
- The Mobile-Friendly update (April 2016)
- Phantom Update (May 2016)
I would like to share what we have tried to uncover ourselves, and would welcome your thoughts/feedback on what may have happened, thoughts on repairing the rank damage, and in general.
In May we noticed a large cooling off of our organic searches from Google, the largest a >30% occured in June, but on average we're seeing a trend of 23% less visitors from organic search than only months prior. Paired with this was a decrease in overall visibility, like a number of pages were struck from indexing.
- The number of URLs ranked in the Top 100 listings dropped by ~ 32% at the beginning of April
- We review our visibility with SISTRIX's Visibility Index tool, which showed a visibility plummet of almost 50% between mid-March and mid-April
- Traffic, until towards the end of July, early August has remained low and now only really returning to normal levels in the past few days.
All that said, we're puzzled by what would cause such a sharp decline in visibility > organic search. Regarding the known/unknown Google Updates, while our primary site is responsive, we do have a number of old help/support pages that are not responsive – So that is one theory, but I'd appreciate any thoughts or insights you have, or to know if anyone else experienced a drop within the same timeframe.
-
It is highly unlikely that responsiveness would impact your search rankings at such a high percentage. Unfortunately, without knowing much more about your site it would be hard to look into it. Feel free to PM me more info and Id be happy to take a look.
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
-
Organic traffic drops a lot
Please check my url that is https://www.drmalpani.com , it was first build up in Joomla and then for security reason, I moved from Joomla to Laravel but in that mean time, I have facing steep fall in organic traffics. It was earlier 10,000 users per day and now I can see only 2500 users per day. I don't know what went wrong, each url are same as it was in Joomla as well I have worked out on all 404 urls too. Looking forward to your guidance on this. Thanks, Bharat
Technical SEO | | DrMalpani0 -
When the Plural has more traffic, but the singular makes much more sense. What to do?
Hey everyone! This is actually the first time I ever posted a question here on MOZ! Guess I was (still am) embarrassed by being an SEO Noob! That being said, I really have to get some input on this matter and i was wondering if you guys might be able to help. I'm optimizing a page for a wedding venue in Portugal. Currently, according to google trends the Plural - Venues for weddings, scores considerably better than the Singular, Venue for weddings(this was researched in Portuguese written terms of course). Despite this, i'm leaning towards an optimization for the Singular term, because the plural seems to un-natural to fit in the content, or title. I managed to fit the Plural in the description but i've read that it hasn't influenced rank directly for a while. Currently my title tag reads: Venue for Weddings | Name of the Venue. I really can't find anyway that it makes sense to me in the Plural... and i feel like if i was a user, i would rather click on the singular term cause it just makes a lot more sense. But my opinion is most probably biased by the fact that i understand that using the plural term will be solemnly an SEO effort to rank higher for a term that has more average searches per month. My question is: In the current state of search algorithms, will an optimization for the singular term, still get me some rank on the plural key phrase? Let me know what you think about this please, and thank you in advance for your time. Most Respectfully, Martim Coutinho dos Santos
Technical SEO | | martim_santos0 -
Content Organization Advice with Big Commerce
Hi folks, We have three places with unique content for our company. Our ecommerce site (hosted on big commerce), our help desk knowledge base (subdomain, hosted on zendesk), and our blog (separate domain, self hosted wordpress). We're about to refocus our efforts on generating high quality content, and I'm trying to figure out the best strategy to organize it. I think from an SEO perspective, if we had all of the content hosted directly on our ecommerce site, that would be best. Unfortunately Big Commerce doesn't have much by way of content management. We can't (yet) install a blogging platform or CMS onto our root domain. What's the next best option? Does it do any good to move our blog to a subdomain? Should I try to post all content on our root domain and just deal with the lack of content management (i.e. just make a new web page for each blog entry). Basically, what's the best strategy in this situation for SEO? Any advice appreciated. Thanks so much! Hal
Technical SEO | | AlabuSkinCare0 -
Does anyone use buzzfeed to creat links traffic and increase brand
Hi i would like to know if anyone uses http://www.buzzfeed.com to create links, gain traffic and increase brand awareness. I have signed up for an account but cannot get it to work and would like some help. I can get my content on there but cannot manage to get the links to work I signed up for this account a while back and a friend shown me how to use it but i have forgotten. here is my page http://www.buzzfeed.com/lifestylemagazine some links work and some links do not. what i am trying to do is to publish stories from my site as well as other sites and have the link included where you press the title and it goes to the site any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Traffic drop after migration?
Hi everybody. One of my clients is looking to move their e-commerce site to a new platform in the next few weeks. However, they been told by several sources that traffic will drop after a migration, which they want to avoid in the run up to Christmas. I've not heard this before, and I thought as long as you pay attention to structure, indexing and redirects a migration should have no impact. We'd be moving to a site with cleaner code, so surely there wouldn't be some kind of penalty for that? Your thoughts would be great! S
Technical SEO | | neooptic0 -
I had a massive ogranic traffic drop in the past 72 hours (80%). What should I do? I
I am very very worried as my organic traffic suddenly came to pretty much a halt last Friday. We have been working very hard on content in the last 2 years and have 0 duplicated content with many thousand travel guides, tips and other travel related info. We are also publishing a successful travel blog which used to get quite a bit off traffic. Everything stalled last Friday and since we are operating in the travel industry which is very competitive, this will be very hard on us. In fact, I fear that we will not survive this drop for more than 2-3 months. How do we find out about what happened and what can we do to get our SERPs back? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | madsuh0 -
Large Drop in Brand-name Traffic
Hey folks, I recently noticed a very large drop in brand-name traffic (in the realm of 50%) which coincided with some SEO changes to target non-brand-name searches. Thing is, the site is still ranking #1 for all the brand-name searches that the traffic drop happened in. (checked terms via SEOmoz toolbar, and also proxy with Bruce Clay's toolbar). Any thoughts on where to start lookingfor the problem or what might have caused it? If this hadn't happened at the same time as other changes, I'd put this down to non-SEO problems.
Technical SEO | | BedeFahey0 -
Traffic drop
Hi All, My site www.gunshotdigital.com has been losing traffic since the last month. I have no actual reason as to why this may be, I have not changed anything on the site either so I am totally baffeled. Can one of you awesome experts pl let me know why this may be? Thank you so much in advance, www.gunshotdigital.com Vijay
Technical SEO | | vijayvasu0