Rankings suddenly dropped significantly

Cianos

Hi there,
This is in relation to a different website I posted about in this thread. It's for someone I know who runs an auto repairs business, who I looked after designing a website for.

The website was ranking quite steadily, hitting some first page/second page results for some of their keywords.

I decided to submit the business and website to a few online business directories. Since then (whether it's related or not), the rankings have shot down. I was expecting the opposite!

For example, between 8th Aug and 18th Aug, Google organic sent 96 visits at a 53% of overall traffic. Then, between 19th Aug and 29th Aug, Google organic has only sent 27 visits, at 55% of overall traffic.

I set up an adwords campaign and on the same day as doing those directory submissions I changed the keywords for it to a more competitive set (so a higher cpc), so the daily budget is exceeded from less hits hence the similar %'s from organic traffic.

Just a bit lost here as to what's going on and whether it's just a temporary downspike or something more serious?

Thanks

The Apprentice

Well to be quite honest its not enough information ..

A ten day slump in traffic is quite literally nothing .. if it was a month i might say something, this could indeed be google dance..
Are u personally doing the seo on this website..
Have u changed onpage seo at all ?? Did u adjust anything, put up new pages or even adjust plugins or perhaps put up some new or delete keywords ?
Also it depends on your keywords, Your main keyword literally that moved from keyword 1 to keyword 2 could have disastrous consequences to your traffic as much as 30%.
Seeing as you lost over 70% of your traffic there is something amiss all right.
There are loads of variables..
One might be google dance.
one might be your main keyword could be dropped a few places hence the bad serp placement. .. Maybe a few of your longtail lsi keywords are gone ??
Your competitor maybe doing seo to beat your ass to no1 ..
You changed something unknowlingy to yourself.. eek
Your host maybe be not performing meaning slower, if at all load times. Perhaps you can see the website online but it maybe just in your cache.. (yes ive seen this happen)
Also the directories, your inputing into.. im concerned a little there. But again not enough info... what ones, page rank, Style of directory etc.
Could be nothing really just me thinking out loud.

Tell you what send on the details, i,ll have a look
I,ll give u a free seo analysis, free keyword analysis offpage and on page seo tips to help you improve where i see fit.

Send keywords and url via pm

worc

New sites sometimes get a little bump/leeway from google when they are first put live - the site might have been high up while it was given this leeway but now it's dropping to a more realistic position.

It's possible the people who were finding the site originally through Google weren't finding what they wanted and went back to search again through Google - when this happens Google notices they found your site but then went looking again so your site gets demoted because if they found what they wanted they wouldn't be searching in Google again. It's pure guess work but it's possible the information on the site just isn't what people are looking for.

As The Apprentice mentioned, without more detail it's hard to know - if the site had few links for most of it's life but then suddenly appeared in 10 directories this is a significant jump and would generally not be natural unless new content had been added. Unnatural links can lead to google penalising you, especially when they don't fit the sites normal inbound link history.

blue4ever

In isolation your figures are difficult to work with. The samples are small and could well be ‘seasonal’ given that August can be the a fcuk up of a month for consistency.

Are the ‘keywords driving the same traffic – not just Google organic as a whole

Are you on Google webmaster tools – the impression and clock through rates – do they yield a story.

See if the new directory links have been taken up by Google, they may not so the directory listings may a red herring.

Use a back link checker to see if the directory listing have been indexed.

New site almost always gets a bounce when they make their first entrance, but dip again thereafter.

Make sure you have content, lots of it and original and not duplicated.