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Organic keyword rankings are going up while organic website traffic is moving down.
Hey, all – I’m experiencing an anomaly here and after hours and hours of research, I have still to find a reason or solution as to why this is happening.
I work on about 30 different websites as a white label SEO contractor, and I have had great success in the past. Over the past 3 months, I have seen tremendous increases in rankings and in indexed keywords for every single one of my white label clients. However, the traffic for every single one of those websites is down. Some are down 1%, others are down 50%, but every site has seen an increase in trunk keyword rankings, and an increase in indexed keywords, sometimes long-tail, sometimes trunk or short-tail. I typically rely on SEMrush and SurferSEO to ensure that my content’s structure is sound. I also use their suggested list of relevant keywords, and the feedback on overall on-page optimization Content Score has always been above 80% – Which have really been amazing rank up organic keywords.
Point is, every graph in Surfer and SEMrush is moving in the right direction, and every time I check the keywords manually they are also doing better, but organic search traffic is down across the board. Any insight as to why this is happening? Is Google simply losing search volume? Is it a bad time of the year for organic search? Every time in the past I have seen a direct correlation with increased rankings and indexed keywords with website traffic from organic sources, so I am really scratching my head here.
Any insight as to what might be going on would be greatly appreciated!!!
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1 Reply
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What is the bounce rate differential between your metrics?
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Stick your keyword sets through Keyword Planner and take a look at the monthly volume – it could be a seasonal drop. Also look at the past 24 months of volume and see if there is a downward trend which could also explain it.
Has the amount of featured snippets increased for your keyword set? If so, you might need to re-think the onpage content to ensure you’re competing on those snippets.
Also a recent cookie implementation & acceptance rates could also be dropping sessions – have seen this with a few of my own clients. In that case, what I do is find out the rejection rate and you can compare against pre/post implementation and ‘find’ your missing sessions by adding the estimated gap in rejections.
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I’m experiencing the same in a home service industry. Unfortunately, demand is simply dropping as the housing market weakens for me.
What kind of industry are you performing the work for?
Anything tangentially or directly related to the housing market, construction, or discretionary spending is seeing decreased demand.
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I had a similar issue and tracked it down to PAAs and FAQs on Google. No reason for a user to click on a link if their answer is already in their face.
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Are the newly ranked keywords high in search volume? If yes Maybe the new keywords are more relevant though lower in volune
Depending on the industry and niche sometimes getting lower traffic is better if you are getting more convertion, leads or sales.
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What’s happening in search console as this will tell you real time? Semrush is purely based on estimates and the surfer graphs are usually miles away not sure where they pull the data from to fil those half the time. The only way you wil get accurate data is from GA and GSC
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Technical issue can be one of the reason for your website traffic is moving down… If pages are loading slowly or not at all, this can result in a decrease in traffic.
Always keep an eye on any changes in Search engine algorithm, and adjust your strategies… This may mean making changes to on page optimization or link building strategies to stay ahead of the curve..
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Mostly a seasonal drop. I faced the same last month and it is now improved. It is fact though, even after ranking in the top 5 there is still the possibility to get less traffic than not ranking posts. It varies with the volume & trend of that keywords.
On SEMRush, I often check changes in keywords volume and intent. And when there is a decrease in the volume of the keyword, I notice a slight or sometimes major decline in traffic despite it ranks in SERP.
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What date range are you looking at? If you are looking at 1-2 weeks data, then it is most likely Easter that is the reason for it.
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Are you only looking at main keyword positions? (Not including image packs).
A construction client got a bunch of “position 1” rankings but actually they were just images.
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