Google Changes Cost Website Traffic

Noticed your web traffic is down for May? Conversions low? Rankings dropped?

In May Google rolled out of one its many algorithm changes, with seemingly significant impact on rankings across sectors and industries.

What’s Happened?
Google has performed an update to improve the speed and relevance of their results. The changes are also designed to increase the ‘stickiness’ of the site to encourage users to spend more time on Google itself.
Message boards in the SEO industry have been overwhelmed with client companies asking why they’ve seen a large drop in site traffic, indexed pages and long-tail keyword performance (phrases with 3 or more keywords).

Matt Cutts of Google comments

”This is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.”
(comments reported on searchengineland)

Why are rankings affected?
Google has essentially changed the way it looks at long tail – the search terms outside of your core or benchmark keywords that are made up of 3 or more words. Previously being identified for the long tail could provide a significant % of traffic. This means pages with low quality content could rank well if they report high relevancy. The emphasis on quality has now increased.

What’s the issue for your Website?
The greatest impact has been on website with extensive reliance on traffic from long tail keywords. Particularly if the site has the following 2 main characteristics;

1. Poor link profile i.e. high volume of links that point only to the Homepage or other main pages.
2. Lack of unique, individual content on each page i.e. poor quality content minimises the authority of the individual page preventing Google from ranking higher.

What You should do first:
1. Check with your SEO agency, web manager etc the performance of your website in May.
2. Outline what impact you’ve seen where i.e. rankings, long tail performance, site indexing etc
3. Identify pages that are ranking better instead. What qualities do they have that make them more valuable to Google?
4. Look at your competitors to assess impact on their rankings. There could be an opportunity to gain competitive advantage if you move quickly.
5. Don’t change anything on a whim!

What to do next:

Concentrate on 2 main areas:
1. Deepen your link strategy.
Improving the links to child pages within your website will drive up the importance of those page for Google.
Look at adding more inbound links that go directly to a variety of pages
Build your social media, online marketing and brand marketing activity into your search strategy
2. Increase the unique content on all your pages. Prioritise by primary, secondary, tertiary pages. Dont be overwhelmed if you have 1000’s of products on your website, start with the best sellers and ensure you protect your rankings for those first.
Add more regular unique content through news, online pr, blog, articles etc to maximise your authority with Google
Include customer comments and reviews that can grow organically

Lastly:
Keep an eye on your competitors. If they appear to be gaining rankings look at how they are working and make your changes accordingly.
Don’t buy links. This will not improve the quality of your website and although it may boost results in the short term, your competitors who concentrate on improving the quality of their links and content will be recognised and rewarded by Google long term.

If you are concerned about your rankings, traffic volumes and conversions, call us now for a FREE review.

Related Posts

1. Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign: Traffic from Search Engines
2. Top tips to improve traffic to your blog
3. Little Used Ways to Boost Your Website Traffic
4. Google Maps now gives you UK Traffic Information
5. Google add a traffic forecast to it Insights for Search Tool
6. 5 easy tips to improve website visibility
7. Google announce that Keywords & Descriptions tags have no impact on ranking
8. Peters Log – Supplemental – February & Traffic Frustrations

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 at 9:42 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.