Traffic diminishing

[martinh666]

Hi

Up until early may, my site was bumping along at between 20-50 visits per day, then gradually increased to a peak of 100 visits per day on 19 and 20 may, fantastic I thought, then it dropped off and by the 28 may it was running at 5 visits per day which is where it has stuck for a month.

My site is a hotel booking site and I have asked around a bit and have the following suggestions:

1. School Holidays. Started on the 23rd May, maybe the build up was people looking for accommodation up till then, then goes quiet when the hols start. This doesn't explain why the visits are still much lower than my average.

2. Duplicate content, External. Because Hotels tend to "paste" their info into the site, it may well appear elsewhere. I can't do much about that.

3. Duplicate content, internal. The site produces lists of searched for hotels. e.g search for Newquay and you get a list of hotels on a "Newquay" page but if you search for a tiny town near to Newquay, you'll get pretty much the same list.

4. I made some changes to the master page that weekend and lost a <h4> tag because I now have an image as a logo rather than the text. I have been told that <H4> won't make a lot of difference and that it wouldn't have affected my traffic as quickly as it dropped off.

My page rank has remained unchanged at 2, it's only the traffic that has dropped.

If anyone can suggest how I can investigate further I'd appreciate it.

Thanks

[scriptster]

Up until early may, my site was bumping along at between 20-50 visits per day, then gradually increased to a peak of 100 visits per day on 19 and 20 may, fantastic I thought, then it dropped off and by the 28 may it was running at 5 visits per day which is where it has stuck for a month.

I think it is really-really hard to make any determination based on the amount of stats 5 visits provide (or even 100 for that matter). It could be skewed by any number of events completely outside of either your control or even completely irrelevant to your site's standing with Google. For example, if your traffic was to hotels in Greece and people are reconsidering going there after they've listened to the news, your traffic may dry up regardless of how well or how poorly your site does in Google.

Although I don't think you'll find the reason with any degree of certainty (given the amount of data you have to work with), you can start by looking at which exact keywords people were coming from. It is usually easier to retain existing or regain old SERP position by adding good content centered around the topics you're already doing well at or were doing well not too long ago.

Going back to the Greece example, if you find that you already had good traffic from keywords about Greece, keep adding good content about Greece, add new Greece destinations, acquire some links from Greek sites. Eventually your Greece - related traffic will return, and, considering that you now have more content, there will be even more traffic. You'll find that if you keep pounding on the theme you were already doing well at once, you'll eventually do well again.

Good luck!

[stunning boy]

do proper seo linkbuiding avoid blackhead you can't predict that x no. of people visit your site just keep going

[martinh666]

Thanks for the replies guys.

My traffic has now hit a big fat 0 for the last 5 days, I'd panic, but Google has actually INCREASED my PageRank for the homepage and started ranking internal pages. t's also crawling 50-100 pages a day.

When the site was getting traffic, Google Analytics reported that: "Search sent 61 total visits via 50 keywords", so it wasn't any particular keyword that was sucessful, but lots that only produced 1-2 visits.

[pgmco]

I would recommend a strong link building plan and always adding new keywords if you want to improve traffic. You can build new pages and blog to also attract new eyes to the site.

[Sariscos]

Hi Martin,

How often are you updating your site?

If you continue with the same content you have for a while, Google will signify that as less relevant and will return more relevant searches for their end users. If you constantly update your content, as well as providing new content, I assure you, you will get more traffic. The key is to keep updating, avoid duplicate content, and always add new content.

As far as link building is concerned, I think Google has a really tight grip on the controls of that. I wouldn't worry too much about it for SEO purposes. As long as what you have is desirable, your link will find it's way on many pages. Hope this helps.

Cheers!

[cartergarth]

run regular promotions, ask for reviews, create a newsletter, participate in web ring, keep building links...

[martinh666]

Thanks for the replies.

The site isn't like a blog where I would write regular articles, but a travel site that retrieves accommodation listings from a database.

Up until the decline, I was still developing the site, so I guess there were minor changes happening daily.

I was wondering if mixing up the lists of accommodation would help. E.G. when G crawls my Newquay page, it sees all accommodation for that town in the same order each time. Maybe it needs to see a different list periodically.

[Speedo12]

It depends on your targeted keywords. If they dropped is normal that your traffic diminished.