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Recovering a tourism website after years of drops
Posted by on January 1, 2026 at 11:29 pmHi everyone, I’m writing because since October I’ve been trying to help with my uncle’s website, a WordPress site that sells tourist excursions.
The site has been online for years, but from 2023 onward it started to perform badly. Unfortunately, historical data is only visible from September 2024, but the situation is this: very few visits overall, and especially the pages that are supposed to sell the excursions are stuck on page three, four, or five, and get very few clicks, maybe 10 or 20 per year at best.
The paradox is that the pages bringing traffic are not the commercial ones, but some blog articles written years ago about a famous movie connected to the local area. Those articles get thousands of impressions and over 1,000 clicks per year, while the excursion pages get almost nothing. In practice, the site currently sells mostly through external channels, like hotels or marketplaces.
Another strange thing is that until around mid-year, about 50% of the traffic appeared to come from China, so I assume it was mostly bot traffic. In the last few months, this traffic has completely disappeared, so I suspect that part of the current traffic drop is simply due to those bots being blocked or filtered out.
Over the years, the site has been hit several times by Google updates, and from 2023 onward it feels like it has been heavily penalized. The backlinks it had were almost all spam or automated, and there had never been any real SEO off-site work done.
Since October, I’ve been working on it myself. The on-site SEO was in decent shape, so I started doing blogpost outreach (including paying), improving internal linking, and writing new articles in multiple languages, all within the same niche. In about two months, I managed to raise the Domain Rating from 3 to around 10 (I know it’s a somewhat vanity metric, but I mention it just to give context). The main competitors, excluding the big players, are roughly in the 15–24 range.
Around September/October, possibly after a Google update, the site experienced another strong drop in impressions. CTR is very low, in some cases basically zero. What confuses me is that from the Search Console graph it’s clear that since I started working on the site, the average position has improved, including for some important pages, yet total impressions have gone down.
I can’t link the graph here, so I’ll summarize the data.
Over roughly 16 months, daily impressions dropped from around 500 per day to about 40 per day. At the same time, the average position improved significantly, moving from around position 48 to roughly the 12–20 range for several pages.The niche doesn’t seem impossible to me. Apart from GetYourGuide and TripAdvisor (where we also sell), the other sites don’t look like massive players spending thousands per month, even though they’ve obviously been working on their sites for longer.
One thing I’ve already done is add internal links from the blog articles that get the most traffic to the excursion pages I actually want to sell, hoping those articles can pass some authority to the commercial pages.
At this point, I’m wondering what else to do beyond continuing with internal linking and targeted link building. Does it make sense to keep pushing informational content, or am I just going to attract more “useless” traffic like what happened with the blog? Is this more of a CTR issue, a domain history problem, or am I simply underestimating the competition? Any external perspective would be really appreciated.
Thanks to anyone who takes the time to reply.
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