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Impressions & rankings up but traffic down - how could this happen?!

by Vinnie Kumar
2 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Recently, after my company received an SEO audit, we decided to update our major services pages (new on-page copy, titles, URLs, H1s, meta descriptions, etc.) to more effectively go after the big keywords that are most searched for in our industry. The aim was to improve organic traffic and help stop our gradual rank slippage for our most traffic-driving keywords.

I rolled out these changes about a month ago and have been keeping an eye on the data. Using Google Search Console and Analytics (plus backup from Moz Rank Tracker), I have come to a very disturbing conclusion.

Our impressions and rankings have improved, but somehow our organic traffic has gone down!

Here are the current hypotheses I'm grappling with:
  • Our CTRs still aren't great, so we probably aren't getting great a great amount of clicks. This is the first thing I'm going to test and optimise.
  • I've somehow missed some key keywords that we used to get traffic from and now our rankings for them have dropped (but I can't seem to believe this one - I've never seen anything weird jump out at me through Google Search Console. And if it is true then there are some seriously weird/non-obvious keywords in our niche. Besides, as far as I can see the pages and their overall copy is much better and less spammy as a whole now).
  • We are now ranking higher and maybe looking worse compared to the big dogs we're sitting next to, so we're somehow getting ever fewer clicks than we did before.

What do you think? Why on earth has this happened - and most importantly how do I fix it?
#happen #impressions #rankings #traffic
  • Profile picture of the author jipolis7
    Are you experiencing this since last few days? There has been a Google penguin update which might cause a rise or a decrease in rankings.
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  • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
    Usually, if there is a rankings increase, it would result in a traffic increase. If that is not happening, the only thing I would be looking at is title tags and meta descriptions. You either have worse title tags that do not grab people's attention or you have worse meta descriptions that are not compelling people to click on them (or both). What is on the actual pages has nothing at all to do with whether people click on a search listing or not.
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