Big dips on traffic.

[Ricc]

Hi.

Ive noticed that on a couple of occasion this year ive had major drops in traffic which didnt happen last year.



I havent made any major changes or had any messages from Google.

Any ppinters what it could be or point me to someone who could help.

[fergusw]

Have you had issues with Google Base? I.e. feeds being disallowed?
Changes in adword campaigns?
Changes in your SEO strategy?
Have you noticed any major changes in rankings on key terms?

I'd also be looking at the kinds of traffic last year to this year, especially the main difference in the origination of traffic immediately prior to and after these "dips" to see if there are any identifiable trends.
Without an historical report on ranking terms throughout the "dip" period it would be hard to pin down the causes, however the analytics should give you most of the info you need.
It is important, as you know, to identify the causes to ensure no re-occurrence in future.

I'd initially focus on explaining the gap at the end Nov/start Dec as a pointer.

[Ricc]

I haven’t made any changes and haven’t used the Google shopping feed since the start of the year since they added the Availability and Shipping attributes. we had deff had a drop in sales this year so were not getting the visitors we normally get during the dipps.

Ill have another look at Analytics but im not very clued up on it to see the problem. I looked at the automated alerts and the only thing i could see was a drop in new visits from the London area. which seems a bit random to me.

[stwcar]

I would also suggest having a look at your rankings in google for these periods to see if there is a correlation between the two.

We had a similar issue when we did a redesign of our site - having made a few stupid errors like removing some internal links, and we saw significant drop in our rankings - as well as the penguin update - over a period of a few months. However, the overall audience figures did not drop as dramatically so yours look like it may be an analytics data error?

[Ricc]

Thanks for your help, ill have a loo at those things.

[Pagesdiy]

In the last six months or so traffic to my site has significantly dropped compared to the number of visitors it used to get. I'm guessing this is mainly due to changes by google and how it indexes sites.

I'm at a bit of a loss what I can do to reverse this and increase visitors to the site again. Any advice would be appreciated.

Cheers,

Chris

[Mike Hughes]

It looks to me like it's primarily a lack of seo effort.

In a nutshell you need to:

1. make sure all your pages have sufficient unique content (including in the meta tags) for google to think they might be worth including in the index.

2. Get more links to your site so google rate the pages important enough.

Mike

[Pagesdiy]

Thanks Mike, I have been working my way through various sections of the site but it's a long slow process but I have managed to get pretty good google results for search terms on those pages where I have focussed some attention.

Is the most likely cause for the dip in traffic mainly attributed to the changes in google and how it ranks websites that occurred last year?

[Mike Hughes]

Is the most likely cause for the dip in traffic mainly attributed to the changes in google and how it ranks websites that occurred last year?

I suspect so, and there have been a few changes made recently that could have a big impact on your site, but having no details to compare like with like it's hard to say for sure.

Your traffic could have been coming from a variety of sources so without more info it's just impossible to say which one has dropped off and why.

When checking for ranking the best thing to do is switch into 'in private' or 'incognito' mode. Otherwise if you have a google webmaster account you run the risk of google showing you any of your own relevant pages, even though no-one else would see them.

And if you don't have a google webmaster account you should get one. It's very important for any webmaster as it helps see what google thinks is happening on your site.

Mike

[chris ashdown]

Is it possible that Google put you on stop as your credit card expired or you paused the campaign for some reason?