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From 7k to 3k in 1 month. What happened?

by krashx
6 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Problem: I've been keeping an eye on our chart of traffic at SEMRUSH and everything was great until August 2015. Our traffic dropped 50%. I understand the google algorithm changes are beginning to roll out and I was trying to determine what exactly gave us the biggest hit. (http://www.semrush.com/info/www.chcfl.org?db=us)

I'd hate to think the 7 to 3 change they did with local listings would account for all the traffic lost. All of our Google Places Local listings were named "Community Health Centers <CITY>" but google recently suggested i change them to just "Community Health Centers".

I did notice we no longer are getting much traffic for "Dentist Near Me" keyword, so that could be part of it, but I'm not sure what to swap in, instead.
  1. Anyone have any ideas?
  2. Anyone see any glaring problems with the site that would be hurting SEO?
  3. "Dentist Near Me" was a keyword our dental page was focused on, but we lost. Anyone have any suggested keywords we should work towards for medical? I never know if its best to focus on our name "Community Health Centers" or just a generic "Local Doctor" or "Pediatrician".

Thanks in advance for any help.



Background: The website is a non-profit medical company (www.chcfl.org) in Central Florida with no marketing budget. I manage it along with a lot of other things and do my best to stay current with SEO changes.
#happened #month
  • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
    I'm certainly a fan of SEMrush. It's a great tool and does a lot - but it has its hiccups. Before you jump to any traffic conclusions you should check your Google Analytics account. If your sessions have dropped there too then you need to have a close look at your site.
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  • Profile picture of the author KylieSweet
    Originally Posted by krashx View Post

    I did notice we no longer are getting much traffic for "Dentist Near Me" keyword, so that could be part of it, but I'm not sure what to swap in, instead.
    "Dentist Near Me" was a keyword our dental page was focused on, but we lost.
    Trusted keyword tool that are usually used by other webmaster is considered as a guide for monthly visits and recommended related keyword phrase. But I would suggest to be more focused on your targeted audience behavior that are mostly on an active online community here you can analyze them to come up an effective keyword targeting phrase that will match their query.
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    • Profile picture of the author krashx
      Originally Posted by KylieSweet View Post

      Trusted keyword tool that are usually used by other webmaster is considered as a guide for monthly visits and recommended related keyword phrase. But I would suggest to be more focused on your targeted audience behavior that are mostly on an active online community here you can analyze them to come up an effective keyword targeting phrase that will match their query.
      I use Google keyword tool to help come up with ideas, but im always confused how I should use it on the website as a whole.

      The homepage I try to focus on "Community Health Center" and "Family Medicine".
      On the each individual location pages I try to focus on their city names and our name ("Tavares Community Health Center").
      On each service we offer page I try to focus on keywords surrounding it "Family Doctor".

      I don't know if this is the best method though. Should I instead just be trying to focus EVERY page on the site on our name "Community Health Center" or on just a few keywords, rather than different ones for each page?
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  • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
    OP, did you have any real website statistics? Such as Google Analytics, or something server side if that's not available. I'm not quite sure how Semrush works in this regard, but unless you've installed a tracking code or "pixel" on your site it's too unreliable to even discuss. They talk about competition research in their FAQ which would indicate that the data is just a guess.

    Once you've got reliable data you should make sure that you're making a comparison that makes sense. Not just yesterday to your best day ever, but at least weeks and preferably months.

    It's possible that your rankings have indeed dropped, but it's not good idea to rely on inaccurate data.
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    • Profile picture of the author krashx
      Originally Posted by nettiapina View Post

      OP, did you have any real website statistics? Such as Google Analytics, or something server side if that's not available. I'm not quite sure how Semrush works in this regard, but unless you've installed a tracking code or "pixel" on your site it's too unreliable to even discuss. They talk about competition research in their FAQ which would indicate that the data is just a guess.

      Once you've got reliable data you should make sure that you're making a comparison that makes sense. Not just yesterday to your best day ever, but at least weeks and preferably months.

      It's possible that your rankings have indeed dropped, but it's not good idea to rely on inaccurate data.

      I've been managing the page since July 2012 and have been using Google Analytics since then. Below is the traffic chart from then till now.
      Screenshot by Lightshot

      It does look as if SEMRush may just be totally off. According to Google Analytics August 2015 was actually our busiest month ever. I feel like the site is falling apart because I never have time to work on it, but it appears to be going up.

      Should I just ignore the SEMRUSH traffic chart then?
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      • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
        Originally Posted by krashx View Post

        Should I just ignore the SEMRUSH traffic chart then?
        Probably. Google Analytics shows the actual traffic, and you can dig down to see where's the traffic coming from. If you experience a drop the answers to your questions lie there. If you know the terms it's relatively easy to draw a conclusion when sitting in front of the actual data, but unfortunately it tends to be hard to analyze the stats over a forum.

        I'm not even sure what Semrush uses, but there's only one way to get reliable data: to actually load something when the user visits. Alexa, for example, bases much of their stats on their browser toolbar, and I've not heard of any "normal" user who uses it in these parts of the world.
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        Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
        Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

        What's your excuse?
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