Since January I’ve noticed the decline in traffic to the blog and sales page for my first information product: Writing College Textbook Supplements: The Definitive Guide to Winning High-Paying Assignments in the College Textbook Publishing Market.
(Note: this post is from June 2010…)
At first I didn’t think about it much. Sales have been increasing since I rewrote the sales page (and doubled the closing rate), and I’ve put the blog itself on the back burner, along with efforts to generate traffic to the site.
Yesterday I looked again at the traffic stats and finally wondered: How come traffic has dropped off more than 50% since the beginning of the year? About 80% of my visitors find me through search engines. I knew I’d been blogging less frequently, but still, my old posts and the sales page should still be pulling in a lot of people.
I’ve had some success with search engine optimization (SEO). After all, I took the precursor of this blog to Google Page Rank 2 in its first month.
The Problem
I finally “viewed page source” on the site.
Guess what? There was no meta site description and no meta keywords.
And then I remembered. I updated to the latest version of WordPress around the first of year and my old theme blew up. I’d just purchased Thesis, so I installed that and the blog came back to life.
However, somehow the site description and keywords got lost in the explosion and recovery.
The Solution
Easy. Went into Thesis and added in a short and keyword-rich description and a list of important keywords. And I checked my Northern California Hiking Trails blog, because I’d replaced my old theme with Thesis at about the same time — but no problems there, and my traffic continues to grow nicely.
Time will tell if this is truly the reason for my traffic decline. My Google Page Rank for Writing College Textbook Supplements dropped from 3 to 2 in early April; perhaps that’s a reflection of the missing site description and keywords, or perhaps it’s a reflection of changes with Google’s algorithm.
The Lessons
1. Pay attention to what’s important for search engine optimization.
2. Double-check important settings on your blogs and sites at regular intervals.
Your Take
What about you? Ever had a similar problem? Share your story with us.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
John
I saw the title of your post over at TIP and had to come read up. glad I did. man, that sure is an easy mistake that could happen, but it’s great you did the investigative work and found what may be the culprit. I probably would have just figured google did a different dance and I lost some juice, but you stuck to it.
B
I also checked several of my other sites just to make sure everything was cool.
Glad the title brought you over! I try hard to write titles that make people want to read more.
Twitter: @BloggersMarket
Hi John,
Well it’s a good thing you weren’t flying the plane! I’ll be doing the flying from here on out. After all, I’m the one who went three months with 3 uniques for each month before I realized that I had set the “Dashboard > Settings > Privacy > Privacy Settings > Blog Visibility” to block all search engine and outside inquiries, while I worked on a database problem and then forgot to re-set it after I was finished.
Tickets anyone?
Jeffrey, that can happen to anyone.
I’m on the mailing list of an old-school information product creator and teacher. His blog has almost no traffic. I checked and his entire blog is “no follow,” probably because of the Wordpress privacy settings.
I e-mailed and told him about it and never heard back. (Although I’ve written a testimonial for one of his products and we’d exchanged several e-mails prior to that.) His blog is still NoFollow.
P.S. It’s not Fred Gleeck, who’s doing some good stuff on his blog and IS DoFollow.
I realized this problem a long time ago. If you don’t use Thesis theme, you can install the plugin Platinum SEO for meta tags and more. Meta keyword is maybe not important at the moment but the description is very necessary for all blog posts.
Yes, I think not having the description was a major negative.
I’ll check out Platinum SEO as a potential recommendation for people who don’t have a good premium theme like Thesis.
YIKES! That must of hurt John. I’m so glad you worked it out. Most people would of just chalked it up to bad luck and not taken the time to research it.
Glad you are back on track and I like the look of your new site.
Just one thing…would love to see a pic of your lovely face in your ‘about’ page… just a thought
Michele, interesting you should mention the picture. I did a bunch of pictures yesterday for a new gravatar and for my websites.
I also have a lot of shots of me outdoors, primarily hiking. I might put one on the about page.
Twitter: @websiteweekend
I have noticed increasing competition for long tail keywords too.
I used to rank fairly well for some keywords getting a few dozen hits per day. No longer. I can see the possibility of day where the front page of Google is gamed into irrelevance. Parasites, sucking the blood completely out of the market. Crazy.
may want to check out this video by matt cutts about this – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ6CtBmaIQM
Michele, thanks for sharing the Matt Cutts video. It does help us understand why some folks, including Dave Doolin, are getting fewer hits through Google searches.
It may be affecting me also, but it’s not that noticeable. My Northern California Hiking Trails blog has been getting tons of search engine traffic lately, more than last year at this time. (Hiking searches go up in spring and summer.)
Twitter: @websiteweekend
Actually, I believe it’s simply increased competition. As the cost for websites and hosting continues to plummet, people in the SEO game can afford to chase keywords further and further out on the tail.
My evidence is from having searches where I started as the only good match, to finding several decent matches, but also a host of “optimized” sites chasing those same words.
I think this also may be related to something I’ve seen surfing. I’ll go to a considerable amount of trouble to find an empty peak on a crummy break. But let me catch even one wave, and there will 4 – 5 people paddle out right afterwards. They don’t look to see what the wave will support, simply having someone else there compels them to form a crowd. Maybe this is what’s happening as well.
Dave Doolin recently posted…Business Outsourcing- Advantages and Disadvantages People still matter most!
Dave, increased competition is often an important factor in declining traffic, and I think it will hurt many websites.
In this case I do think it was the loss in important meta data when I changed themes. I’m writing this now in April, 2011, and traffic is higher than it’s ever been.
John Soares recently posted…Edit Old Blog Posts to Boost Search Engine Optimization and Traffic
Twitter: @websiteweekend
Totally agree in your case, was writing specifically about my main website, which now has two competitors neither of whom operate blogs.
Last I checked, metadata still isn’t weighted for SERPs, but I consider well-written metadata critical for enticing readers. It’s that “Line 2″ of the copy, just after the headline!
And it’s great you’re getting better traffic!
Hi John, good for you on tracking down the problem. I have a question, do you need the All in One SEO plugin if you are using Thesis? I thought most of these settings you mentioned are applied with the plugin instead of the theme.
Thanks!
My understanding is that once you have Thesis, you don’t need All in One SEO or any other SEO plugins. Great SEO is one of the main selling points of Thesis.
hi John Great post.
keeping up with your blog is one of the big problems, especially when you change over.
Looking into upgrading to Thesis, since it seems to be the most highly recommended everywhere I go.
Question, since you don’t need the seo plug-ins with Thesis, does it have an import funciton? I would hate to have to go into every post and redo all my seo. I have one blog with over 1k posts.
James, I’ve been very happy with Thesis. (my affiliate link) I purchased the developer’s license so I could use it on all my sites.
I searched the Thesis site and found this answer about how to import SEO values.
Hope this helps!
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