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In 2006, our web traffic grew at an average of 20% compared to 2005. But now our traffic is down 3% compared to last year at this time.
When I dove in deep into our starts, it appears that 60% of our traffic comes from international search engines. And that is where the traffic dip is occurring.
Our North America traffic is up 15% for search engines and Adwords.
So my question is, what would cause such a dramatic drop in our international traffic? Specifically, France and Germany. And of course, how can i get it back up? :)
Thank-you for any thoughts/ideas.
Your site is probably being served up less outside USA & Canada
-How do i do this?
A German or Bulgarian looking for info on "yellow widgets" would probably prefer a German, Bulgarian or European website to a North American website
No, I don't know the solution
The search engines - specially Google - have become better at figuring out what to serve international users.
If I search Google.com here from Denmark, I'll very different results that you do in Canada - even on the same keyword. Yours will be Canada biased, mine Danish. Furthermore you mention the site being in Canada, right? ..so if someone searches from say Denmark, they might not even be able to find your site as Google serves me sites that are based here.. or tries to. It sometimes goes very bad for them, but in general it works out pretty well.
They do this by looking at ip, domain extension (.dk, .ca etc.), language and links pointing to the site. If they all "say" Canada, well the site has to be mostly for canadians.
The solution:
Build local language sites hosted in the country you're targetting with that country's domain extension (ccTLD).
Hope this makes sense?
[edited by: Rumbas at 2:40 pm (utc) on April 25, 2007]
Interesting idea, any other ideas to grow international traffic?
Thanks again!
B
