Traffic down 50% 8/20-9/20 - You?

[peakay]

Our ecommerce site is -50% in Google organic traffic form 8/20-9/20. Most of the hit is from some generic terms we ranked #1 for in the past but are now mid page or off page 1.

Interestingly, our overall revenue is still up, but we believe that is largely due to existing customer reorder traffic. Losing 50% of Google organic will hurt us big over time.

Anyone else seeing this? Recommendations? Backlink, backlink, backling or ?

Thanks!

[louieramos]

Have you compared how many search keywords clicked there are in your analytics between those period. Based on my experience in this, the lost traffic of ecommerce sites is because of the reduced amount of search keywords traffic from the previous month

[Yellow_Sun]

peakay,

Our organic traffic has increased slightly over that period of time.

It's good to hear your overall revenue has gone up even with the decrease in traffic.

Is your website new and are you continuing to update it or just letting it sit? I find it a little odd you were ranked #1 for some keywords and are now off the first page. If your website is new I can see this happening as well as if you are not keeping it updated. Or, if you have done anything else out of the ordinary that might hurt your site and rankings.

Just a few thoughts, but hope things turn around for you!

[peakay]

louie - I did check and we actually have more search keywords in the last month, but far less traffic. We dont have a large catalog, so we target a few keyword combinations thta drive the most traffic for our business. i do appreciate the post and giving me another way to think about it though.

Yellow - it is not new and we do some updates, but its not a huge content site. I created an advanced segment and checked new vs. returning visitors and it appears we are down in revenue by 50% on new visitors, which is not good. we are just having the overall issue masked by strong sales form existing customers.

If anyone has any tips, let me know. We will try to build more links using the keywords we are now soft on, but we want to make sure nothing looks "unnatural" to google so as to not get penalized.

[enigma1]

You can revise the site changes in the past few months if you believe it is something to do with your site rather than competition.

Check the server logs also see if there are requests that aren't served for whatever reason. Sometimes even minor changes can affect the entire site. Check with different browsers, different configuration settings see if any errors come up when entering the site a customer.

[peakay]

Well, the change happened pretty much exactly the same day as Google's last announced algo change:

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

However, its not like some major site suddenly got all placements on these pages. We did change our product mix a bit, but I would have thought they didn't affect the keyword search on this other product where we are really taking the hit. I think somethign in this change must have triggered it as our traffic fell exactly the same day as this...I think we just need to adapt to the change.

Any other recommendations would be welcome...

[Planet13]

Is the conversion rate for new visitors the same as for returning customers?

Were a lot of the previous visitors coming from countries that you don't sell to anyway, and now the traffic is reduced to countries that you DO primarily sell to?