traffic but no sales

lost sales in last few months

[rayadams]

My website has been going through some hard time for last few months. I am running this site for last 6 years and so far it has performed well.

This site sell products and most of the visitors comes from Google organic searches. Though the keyword ranking fluctuates however for competitive keywords are within the first page.

Starting September 2009 for some reason the sales started to drop. In Oct 09, the site got infected twice with malware and was flagged by search engines for one day each time. Since then sales almost dropped to nothing and continues to this date.

My programming knowledge is very limited so I posted this problem in Google Webmaster Forum hoping someone will be able to point me to the problem area but no such luck there.

Now I am here and still looking for an answer. Like to mention here that this is a Canadian site doing 95% of the business in USA through internet.

I paid someone to analyze the site to determine if there are issues that may be preventing people from purchasing. He came up with no significant suggestion only some such as I should get more back links, submit articles to directories etc (SEO related stuff).

I feel that there is something wrong with the site otherwise I will not be losing 75% of the sale. Unfortunate part is that I can not figure out the problem.

Hope there are experts here who can share their knowledge and guide me to right direction.

Thank you in advance

[edited by: phranque at 2:29 am (utc) on Jan. 21, 2010]
[edit reason] No urls, please. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[dpd1]

Not knowing what you sell, I don't know how hard hit you would be by economic things. Obviously that's a factor for everybody lately. Unfortunately, with certain products, it could very well be economic. But how are the sales as compared to the traffic? Is the traffic the same as before?

[Meddy]

Yes, one can't say anything without knowing what you are selling - maybe this is the peculiriaty of the goods. And it is necessary to know what the traffic is!

[rayadams]

I will have to go back and read the submission policy in detail so I can post the needed information.

I have been told by people that US economy in not doing well. I had better luck in 2008 and till mid 2009 when the time was even tougher. But for some reason things fell apart afterward .

Feed back from potential consumers only tells me that they are careful in spending money but they have not stopped it.

[edited by: phranque at 12:45 am (utc) on Jan. 22, 2010]
[edit reason] TOS [webmasterworld.com] #24 [/edit]

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], rayadams!

as others have already implied, traffic is a more important indicator than ranking.
your analytics should be very helpful here since it can tell you what traffic history is, bounce rate, page views, time on site, etc.
how has your traffic from other search engines changed since pre-september?
you might consider a paid search campaign to get traffic until you solve the organic-related problem.
does GWT tell you anything useful?

[rayadams]

Thank you.

Traffic has been is very consistent before and after Sept. Checking at Google Analytic report I do not see a drastic change. Also do not see any unusual trend when comparing factors such as bounce rate, page view times etc to historic data.

And when I said about ranking, I did not mean the page rank. Page rank is least of the problem. What I meant was the keyword ranking which can directly reflect on the traffic. The higher the position of the keywords,the more traffic to your site. At least this is what I know.

If I had a loss of traffic, I could possibly understand the reason but since all factors seems to be working fine and hardly any conversion is the biggest problem.

[phranque]

i wasn't speaking of pagerank, either.
with the implementation of personalized search, the SERP position you see may not be what others see.
i would check every possible metric in analytics and look for a discontinuity in september.
i'm also wondering if that malware flag put you on some type of blacklist such link scanners used by antivirus browser plugins. (although this would probably be reflected inyour traffic numbers)

[rayadams]

I use couple of different software to determine the keywords position and also manually check on my local computer. At times there are slight variations depending which data center they are getting the information from but for most part they are consistent.

I would take your advise and check analytic again hopefully I can find something.

I was also thinking of the aftermath of malware attack. Possibly the site is still blacklisted somewhere but could not find any such tool that checks this. If you know of any such tool please let me know.

I believe Google Safe Browsing Diagnostic page displays record for 90 days and it is possible that indirectly they may still be penalizing the site. Though the traffic number does not confirm this.

[MrHard]

Keep tabs on competitor, esp. new ones, for price undercutting.

[hugstech]

it may the cause the page load by the keyword is not right, means if you are selling product xyz and the page i.e in rank is for the abs the visitor reach at your page by read good title-description a visitor come to page but with our proper information the left the page and you not got any lead

[rayadams]

That is not the case. This is an old website dedicated to its niche and receives targeted visitors. Also in the past it has performed well.

[londrum]

i would check your logs, to see where people are bailing out of the sale. and then compare it with your old logs. maybe that will point you to the bit that's no longer performing.