'Net Features : traffic

5 Reasons Your Search Traffic is Declining

Michael Garrity — Tue, 07 May 2013 18:27:00 GMT

Maybe it’s been happening over the past few weeks, or even months. Slowly, but surely, you’ve been watching your traffic numbers decline, despite not having changed much of anything about the way you publish content or optimize your website for the search engines.

Naturally, you’ll want to know exactly what’s going on and what’s causing this continual dip in traffic. For some problems, you may be able to look at your analytics platform to determine what content is seeing its traffic numbers decrease, which could help you clearly identify where you’re struggling.

However, in most cases, you’ll have to perform some kind of search result audit for your various keywords that will show you where you’re currently ranking on Google and its competitors for your most important keywords. Ultimately, this could reveal one (or more) issues that are holding you down in the SERPs and, thus, negatively affecting your traffic numbers.

But before you begin investigating, it might be helpful to know what you should be on the lookout for. So, here are the five most likely reasons that you’ve been seeing your website traffic decrease:

New Competition
(Too) many website owners and SEO professionals tend to a take an “it’s all about me” approach to their work, and when they start to have an issue like declining traffic, their initial instinct is to wonder what it is THEY are doing wrong and what THEY have to do to fix it. However, few immediately consider the possibility of a new website (or sites) that have moved into their niche and are luring away some of their traffic by offering comparable products or content. This is one of the reasons why conducting regular industry assessments and search audits is imperative.

Content is Out of Date
Every good content creator strives to make something evergreen that will last forever, so that visitors will consistently come to his or her website to read it. However, over time, the majority of content will become dated, and its value will begin to depreciate at a regular pace. One way to tell if your content isn’t as enticing to searchers as it used to be is to monitor that page’s analytics, and if something that used to get a consistently high influx of visitors now gets less and less, it’s likely that the content on the page is decreasing in value to most readers. A method for correcting this issue could be to produce a new, updated version of that content, and then to link to the new page on the old one.

Shifts in Algorithm Values
This is another instance where your decreasing traffic isn’t actually your fault. Occasionally, Google and the other search engines will alter their algorithms to give more weight to certain types of content for specific search terms. When that happens, images, videos, wiki pages or other content that is slightly different from standard Web pages may be given prominence over your site, which can have an effect on how much traffic you get from that search engine. If you notice that Google seems to favor certain types of content for one of your keywords or targeted search terms, maybe that means you should consider making a video or infographic the next time you consider writing a blog post about a that topic.

Caught Red Handed Being a Black Hat
And other times, SEOs are knowingly or unknowingly participating in nefarious “black hat” SEO tactics in order to move their sites higher up in the SERPs. Once Google and the others bust you – and they almost always will – they’ll penalize your site and send you way down in the rankings, and that will obviously affect your traffic. If you genuinely weren’t intending to be shady and just made a mistake, it’s important that you find out what your exact offense was and correct it as soon as possible, so that you can start trying to garner some good will with the search engines and make your way back up in the rankings.

They’re Just Not That into Your Content
However, the unfortunate truth is that much of the time, consumers just aren’t going to be that interested in the content that you’re publishing, meaning it’s not engaging or valuable enough to hold their attention and keep them coming back for more. And without engaging content, your traffic numbers are going to suffer. To rectify this problem, you should be aware of the top sites and blogs in your niche or industry, and take note of what they’re regularly publishing content about (in order to understand emerging trends) and what their readers are saying in comments sections and on social media sites to see what they’re asking for, so that you have a better idea of what content will be engaging and valuable to the visitors you want to attract.

Google Dominates 90 Percent of B2B Space

Amberly Dressler — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 15:32:00 GMT

From search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) to social media and email, Web workers use a variety of tools to build and sustain website traffic. But knowing what is actually working to achieve these goals (Web-wide) is important not only for accurate budgeting of time and money, but also managing stakeholder expectations.

Optify’s recently released 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report can help. The company analyzed more than 27 million visits to nearly 600 B2B sites from various traffic sources throughout 2012.

“We weren’t shocked at the data, but we were surprised,” said Optify Chief Marketing Officer Doug Wheeler.

The first takeaway is that organic search serves as the number one driver of traffic to B2B websites, followed by direct traffic (40 percent) and referrals (11.50 percent). The report also finds that despite the increased adoption of social media by B2B in 2012, itʼs still only a fraction (1.90 percent) of total traffic to B2B websites. It is important to note, however, that the report also found that Google is responsible for nearly all of organic search, making it the single most important referring source of traffic.

“In the B2B space, 90 plus percent is coming from Google,” said Wheeler. “When you are looking at where you are going to spend your money, that’s imperative to know. Second, we are now seeing more than 40 percent of all organic visits from Google coming back as ‘not provided.’

“Google is spending more of its resources, taking that data away and at some point, you have to understand how it is you are going to acquire traffic, customers living in a paid information world. The way to get that traffic is through paid media.”

Very soon on the horizon, Wheeler expects seeing analytics, around what traffic is coming to your site, moving from free to paid. Understanding and optimizing everything Google is going to be imperative, but Web workers also need to find out if paid search makes financial sense to their companies.

The report states, “For the companies that run paid search campaigns successfully, paid search has the potential to be a sustainable, strong source of leads. But not all companies can, or should, run paid search campaigns. Analyze your paid search potential (price point, average cost per lead, realistic conversion rates, resources, etc.) to find out if this source is for you and how much you can get out of it.”

Optify also looked at sources for converting traffic.

“Don’t put away that checkbook for email,” said Wheeler. “Email is number one in terms of conversion.”

According to Optify, the average conversion rate among all B2B websites in the report, across all sources, was 1.6 percent. Additionally, email shows the highest coversion rate compared to all other sources.

“Surprisingly, organic search, the number one drive of traffic, is at the bottom of the conversion-rate list, second only to social media among the sources with lowest conversion traffic,” read the report.

And while the report states that only 5 percent of B2B traffic comes from social media, Twitter outperforms Facebook in terms of lead conversion by more than a 9-1 ratio. Why does Twitter convert so well?

“I think it’s because it’s an accepted form of communication, almost like email,” asid Wheeler. “It’s just a different style, so people respond to it more instantly. They wouldn’t bother communicating with you if they didn’t want to respond, that’s my pure, opinion.”

The full report is available for free download.

“In reading this report, you might discover that you are doing better or worse than the published benchmarks and discover areas of potential for your marketing activities,” said Wheeler.

Tumblr Tumbles into Top U.S. Sites

Allison Howen — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 17:30:00 GMT

Tumblr isn’t just for teens anymore.

In fact, Tumblr recently announced in a blog post that an audience of 168 million people has pushed the social network into the ninth spot of Quantcast’s top ten U.S. Websites.

The social blogging site, which was launched in 2007, is most popular amongst the 18-24-year-old demographic. However, many top brands have already taken advantage of this network’s popularity and solidified a presence on the site, including apparel retailers Macy’s and Urban Outfitters and content publishers Time Magazine and The Onion.