Forum Moderators: open
Traffic from April through June increased, and was 30% higher than the same period in 2005, when they had a different SEO and hosting company handling their site.
Now the traffic has levelled off. It's pretty much the same as it was last year, even though they're ranking much, much better for the terms they want.
At this time last year, they were paying for PPC ads. The SE traffic they're getting now is from organic SE results. Still, I expected a boost in traffic.
Any suggestions as to where my thinking is wrong?
For example, your site may have gone from 25 to five on your key search terms, but if there's 100 new sites in your niche, there's no guarantee you'll do any better.
Maybe it's more of a marketing issue than SEO; maybe it's time to review the keywords that you are targetting.
You could also usefully review TITLE and description meta tags; when the site appears in the serps, doe it look good, compared to those above and below? Or does it blend in? Or does it shout in BLOCK CAPS and have no decent description?
Better rankings, but traffic stays the same?
Sounds like the keyword phrases they have better rankings for are not the ones they should be targeting. ;)
the terms they want
What research was done to show that those terms are the ones that people use?
I've often found that the worst people to consult about search phrases are the owners of a company - they have a load of phrases they WANT people to search with but these are usually quite unrelated to the phrases people actually use.
You made changes. Your rankings rose, generally speaking, producing a roughly +30% increse over prior year. After the rankings settled in at a higher level, the traffic leveled off. That all sounds normal unless I am misunderstanding.
The part about PPC is less clear to me but obviously if they've de-emphasized that program, overall traffic would drop. If you've already accounted for that there is still another issue: Organic click through's are higher when the organic listings are paired with PPC listings on the same page of the SERP's. So the absence of the PPC ads would cause something of a decline in traffic, given otherwise identical rankings/SERP's.
Make sense?
When I took over the SEO tasks, our company dropped the client's PPC campaign. My boss told them that they could pay for PPC, or they could pay for SEO work, but not both.
Now, roughly 30% of their traffic comes from Google alone. So, in my email to the client today, I stressed the point that they're getting better rankings, and more traffic from organic search results.
I agree with some of the above comments about the keywords not being the right ones. So, in the email, I told the client that we need to focus more on what her company actually does when optimizing for keywords.
Her company doesn't make various types of metal products; it makes a special coating for those products. But she's had me focus on the products, rather than the coating.
