Site Ranking Well - But No Traffic

[sunnyujjawal]

One of our sites was hardly hit by Panda, after that we change it's content and increase interlinking of pages but no improvement in rankings but after Penguin we were back almost in first 3 pages for all of our keywords but we are not getting traffic from those keywords. we get revenue and traffic from our brand name only.

Keywords selection is also fine as per Google Keyword Tool and Search trends.

[edited by: tedster at 4:43 pm (utc) on Jun 18, 2012]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:44 pm (utc) on Jun 18, 2012]

[aristotle]

If you setup Google's Webmaster Tools for the site, it will will give you some useful ranking and referral information, including CTRs for each keyword.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

It's funny you mentioned GWT because mine is giving me some silly(at least to me) information.

example from a top url page with 1000+ impressions and 100+ clicks per day.

- impressions down 71%
- Clicks down 59%
- Position change +1 (to 1.9) ?

If I were to believe what's being displayed it suggests they are displaying my site 71% fewer times and sending me half the visitors but my average rank improved from position 3 to position 2? That doesn't make any sense unless they are not showing my site at all to a larger subset of search visitors.

e.g. when they DO show my page I'm well ranked but they aren't showing it nearly as often. I have no idea what metric is causing them to ommit my site from a lot of searches for a given keyword, but their data suggests they are. If I had to guess I'd say they are leaving my site out of serps when they think a visitor is likely to buy.

Being ranked for a keyword would then mean nothing, you'd need to be ranked AND meet whatever other criteria Google is looking for on any given search. Talk about pulling a fast one on people obsessed with rank!

[Panthro]

Yeah I'm not a big fan of WMT or even GA anymore.

[buckworks]

but my average rank improved

For many searches, Google's own "stuff" is pushing down the organic listings so far that even if you gain a higher rank in the organics, you might still have a lower position on the results page than you used to.

[Robert Charlton]

...we were back almost in first 3 pages for all of our keywords but we are not getting traffic from those keywords.

In some niches, I wouldn't expect searchers to look on page two or on page three, maybe not even very deep on page one, so you perhaps shouldn't be expecting much traffic from the positions you mention.

Keywords selection is also fine as per Google Keyword Tool and Search trends.

In my experience, Trends isn't very granular, and while it may suggest high volume searches, it often doesn't suggest searches that are likely to attract clicks. Searchers freqently refine their searches on highly general queries without clicking through, so the Trends you're seeing, along with impression data indicated in the Google Keyword Tool, may not turn into traffic.

Additionally, what type of keyword matching are you using when you use the Keyword Tool? Leaving the tool set at its default Broad match setting can give you an extremely unrealistic picture of search volume for your phrases on organic search.

[legaleagle]

I suspect that you are still not ranking high enough to benefit from organic traffic. Even on page one these days it can be a struggle to get traffic as advertising and top half of serps gain the majority of clicks, let alone being three pages deep