How can you go to page 1 with top 3 terms and lose 66% of traffic?

[ParkEagle]

I really don't get it. We have hired PPC experts- SEO experts and worked hard to take a site that paid no attention to SEO, did their PPC internally (which means didn't have a clue) and moved up to page 1 - position 3-7 for the top 3 terms in our niche - and increased PPC bids and doubled our budget which resulted in clicks doubling in price - and the result??????
Traffic dropped 66%!! 66%. And this is after hiring others to improve results. And not just one- but experts across the board.

Incredible. How can anyone explain that their are worse results doing it the right way?

Now I know I'm going to get things like, You didn't hire me. Or the market has changed. But come on - from NO page rankings to #1- to increasing budget and ad costs doubling? Come on.

[Amitywill]

Originally Posted by ParkEagle

I really don't get it. We have hired PPC experts- SEO experts and worked hard to take a site that paid no attention to SEO, did their PPC internally (which means didn't have a clue) and moved up to page 1 - position 3-7 for the top 3 terms in our niche - and increased PPC bids and doubled our budget which resulted in clicks doubling in price - and the result??????
Traffic dropped 66%!! 66%. And this is after hiring others to improve results. And not just one- but experts across the board.

Incredible. How can anyone explain that their are worse results doing it the right way?

Now I know I'm going to get things like, You didn't hire me. Or the market has changed. But come on - from NO page rankings to #1- to increasing budget and ad costs doubling? Come on.

Is your website seasonal based? I have a website that gets very little
traffic all year but in the summer time it spikes.

Or was your site generating a lot of longer tail keyword traffic before
and now it's not?

I had a website drop in traffic by around 70% after the Google farmer
update. It was a quality site but it seemed to lose a lot of rankings
for longer tail keywords and broad traffic which resulted in huge traffic
loss.

Just my thoughts and I feel for you man. I know what it's like to
lose a lot of traffic on a website.

But it's not the end! Just work at it and you'll get your traffic back and
more.

Will

[pokerdawg]

It's easy. You probably hit a daily budget cap on your account. Since they were paying more for clicks, you can afford less of them.

When we manage someone's account, we look at it like this...

1 - If you have unlimited budget, you will get the most traffic at rank 1 (we don't recommend this as a strategy)

2 - If you have a limited budget, then you have to balance bid & rank with traffic.

For #2, here's a wildly stretched example:

Assume KEYWORD is $20 for Rank 1 and $1 for Rank 3.

Assume you have a $60/day budget

Assume there are a lot of searches each day.

In scenario 1, you could afford 3 clicks at $20 each = $60 and you are out of money

In scenario 2, you could afford 60 clicks at $1 each = $60 and you are out of money

So they may have reached for higher ranks, and sometimes that makes sense, but if you run out of money for the day, then it is a bad strategy.

Hope this helps. PM me with any specific questions.

[ParkEagle]

Believe me I understand. It isn't the PPC that I am the most concerned about. Sure the keywords have doubled in Price. Sure I'm spending more and getting less clicks. But what is the most troubling is the organic traffic.
We moved from page 5 to page 1- in 3 terms and we get less organic searches than before.

[TurnkeyBusinessBlogs]

Originally Posted by ParkEagle

Believe me I understand. It isn't the PPC that I am the most concerned about. Sure the keywords have doubled in Price. Sure I'm spending more and getting less clicks. But what is the most troubling is the organic traffic.
We moved from page 5 to page 1- in 3 terms and we get less organic searches than before.

Get used to it. This is the nature of organic search. We've worked hard for years hoping to the top of the SEs for a popular keyword, just to find out that after we got there, there wasn't nearly as much traffic as we thought.

It takes allot of traffic to make money too. Our business is likely one of the MOST frustrating businesses to be in, and in the long run the most rewarding. Nothing is more sought after that a solid residual income that keeps coming like a money tree.

Also, just because your search results are showing your placement on your browser and from your relative IP, does not mean that is where you are showing up in other parts of the country, or the world. Just a guess.

[Black Hat Cat]

Originally Posted by TurnkeyBusinessBlogs

Get used to it. This is the nature of organic search. We've worked hard for years hoping to the top of the SEs for a popular keyword, just to find out that after we got there, there wasn't nearly as much traffic as we thought.

But he didn't say he was getting less traffic than he expected, he said he is getting less traffic on page one than he was getting on page five. That's not the nature of organic search, and makes no sense.

I'm guessing there's more the story, especially considering there's not going to be any traffic to speak of on page five in the first place.

[pokerdawg]

Perhaps traffic was coming in on a different variation of a keyword you aren't tracking, and you lost that rank?

What tools do you use to track sources of traffic and keywords?