Wordpress business site haemorrhaging visitors

[Amateurish]

I've got a fairly simple wordpress site for my business, it's been up and running for over a year. Visitor numbers have been fairly consistent until they dropped off a cliff at the beginning of May. I'm now at a third of previous numbers. Any pointers as to what investigations I could do to find the problem? The site itself seems to be running fine.

[The Moose]

Where were your visitors coming from? Where are they coming from now?

You'll find the analytics that it'll be split into several such as Google Organic, Google Paid, Yahoo etc etc etc.

This will allow you to see which areas that you've been driving traffic have stayed consistent and which have dropped quite easily.

Then you have to work out what changed? My guess is that it happened towards the end of May and has been because of Google's recent big Panda update and you're now seen as a low quality site...

[Amateurish]

For April was 81% Google organic, 13% direct.
For May was 78% Google organic, 14% direct.
For June to date 81% Google organic, 9% direct.

So losing numbers fairly equally across the channels?

[Frimley111R]

So 5% direct. Have you stopped any form of marketing recently? Alternatively have you seen any increase in competitor activity?

[The Moose]

You really need the actual number of visitors as opposed to %ages?

[Amateurish]

No it's much worse than that. My overall numbers are a third of what they were a couple of months ago. But the split between channels remains roughly equal. So for June to date, I've lost 60% of Google organic, and 70% of direct compared to the same period a couple of months ago.

[The Moose]

How many visitors were you getting a month?

[Amateurish]

I'd rather not give specifics.

[DSLiverpool]

Pay a SEO guy to do a report, it wont be £lots but may save your bacon - there is only so much info Google will tell you.

[Pot Bellied Fool]

The site in your profile?

Some quick hits that are quick & easy & will help:

Better page titles. You don't really need Chalet Jordan in each one, use them to really sell the sizzle! Tell Google what you're really about. Don't use extraneous words like 'the' 'and' etc, for the location page for example, "Ski | Les Gets | Avoriaz | La Grande Terche | Morzine" would be far more effective (No, I haven't bothered to count the charcaters in that title )

Download the Yoast SEO plugin, it'll help you with titles & descriptions for each page.

Consider better ALT text on the images.

Use that footer to better advantage. Rather than the 'Powered by Wordpress' standard stuff, replace that with your Company name & contact/location details.

There's been a few severe Google updates recently but not really targetted at your type of site BUT Google is more & more about quality of information & at the moment, you're not going out of your way to help Google work out what you're all about.

[mike9009]

Sorry for the dumb question, but I presume you are discussing the website in your profile??

Would you not expect the web traffic to drop for a ski chalet during the summer months? Did you have a similar trend last year?

I could be way off track with the number of daft assumptions I have made...... sorry!

Mike

[Amateurish]

Thanks for the suggestions, but it's not that particular site.

Any ideas what kind of issue I should be looking for?

[Stevanos]

There was a Google Panda update in May that could of affected your site if it was not up to scratch.

[jonamv8]

Few sites jumping about lately in the SERPs. We have access to software which, at a cost, would be able to tell you the reasons. It tracks Google changes and syncs them with your on/site profile at that time. Let me know if you want any more info

[0a]

It will probably be the panda update - "direct" can mean all sorts of things in analytics depending on how the site is set up and your "direct" proportion is low anyway.

[maffski]

It's going to be hard for people to offer any worthwhile advice if you won't tell them which website it is. Is it this one? [removed]

If so then then I suspect the things mentioned previously apply here also. If I search Google for 'divorce lawyer milton keynes' then you come up as the first entry on page two - I suspect you were previously at the bottom of page one, which, if this is vaguely right is worth gets twice as many clicks.

And if it is this website I'm not sure I would use you. It looks like the Creative Commons images on the site are non-commercial (except for one), I would have said touting for business counts as a commercial use.


Edit: Removed website as it's not my business to choose what other people reveal, and just cos it's the internet doesn't mean I have to be an

Edited by maffski on Monday 23 June 10:17

Edited by maffski on Monday 23 June 10:18

[Phateuk]

Not directly related to losing visitors, but how do you rank in bing?

I initially didn't bother with it, but after submitting one of my sites that's now where most of my organic traffic comes from. It seems to be much easier to get into the higher rankings (I'm position 2 of page 1 for certain searches). I didn't think that many people used non-google search engines, but I think with MS including it as default with IE etc a lot of non-technical people don't care/reaslise.

Interestingly the site in question is pretty niche with a specific purpose and searching for keywords that pretty much describe it in bing yields the hit, but in google non-related sites are listed above :/

[Amateurish]

Thanks for the advice so far. Since this is effectively a bad news story for a new business, I've chosen not to reveal the domain name publicly, but have PMed details to everyone individually who has offered advice. So thanks for your discretion! The copyright point has been resolved since I have the copyright owners' permissions to use the images in this way.

Bing ranking is terrible - so thanks will look at that.

[Phateuk]

Amateurish said:

Thanks for the advice so far. Since this is effectively a bad news story for a new business, I've chosen not to reveal the domain name publicly, but have PMed details to everyone individually who has offered advice. So thanks for your discretion! The copyright point has been resolved since I have the copyright owners' permissions to use the images in this way.

Bing ranking is terrible - so thanks will look at that.

I didn't do anything except submit here: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url The resultant rank is just natural from the site.

Incidentally my blogger (google owned) blog doesn't show in bing at all even after submitting it, despite being on page one in google