Sudden drop in traffic

[gazza777]

Hi all,

We have a case where we have a sudden drop in traffic on a customers website. A bit of history: We ran Google Adwords for around 12months, initially the website had about 5-6 organic hits a day. After enabling Adwords it went up to around 30 hits per day.

We then started doing some SEO 4 months ago and traffic steadily increased each month to where it go to over 100 hits a day (peaking at 120hits/day)

So we assumed SEO was working well, we had added good keyword rich content to the domain, submitted to various directories and all was well....

Until we decided to drop Google Adwords!! Seeing that our SEO efforts were bring in results we decided to pause the Google Adwords, and BOOM, we dropped back down to around 10 hits per day!

In a bit of a panic, we enabled Google Adwords again, with the exact same settings, we only managed to push it up to 25-30 hits a day for a week, after which it fell to 10 hits per day agian once we paused Adwords again....

So what gives? Is Google punishing us for stopping Adwords by removing all the organic hits?

Any help will be appreciated!

Gary

[deepsand]

So we assumed SEO was working well, we had added good keyword rich content to the domain, submitted to various directories and all was well.

Does that mean that you haven't looked at organic vs PPC traffic in the interim?

Absent such split data, we're in the dark.

[gazza777]

Hey deepsand,

We did see the split, and around 70% of all traffic was organic. However I could never get Google Analytics to tie up data from Google Adwords... despite following instructions to the T.

But without the actual Adwords data being pulled into Analytics, as I say, around 70% organic.

With the steady rise in traffic we assumed that would be the SEO results as the Google adwords campaign remained the same. Here is a screenshot of this website traffic over the last year:

SOD SEO.jpg

I hope you can see this image ok, looks very small in the post above and never posted an image before here.

[deepsand]

No need for guessing when the actual AdWords data are available directly from the AdWords account itself.

[Arkan]

But didnt you check your rankings for the keywords you were doing your SEO. Did they drop? If so how much?
Any changes in the indexed pages?

I heard that before people talking that Google penalized them because they switched form AdWords to SEO, but I still think this is just a rumor

[gazza777]

Deepsand, of course I have all that info, do you want me to post actual data from adwords and analytics?

Akran, I have an independent SEO consultant working on this client for me, so how would I track keyword rankings? And is there a way to get historical data on keywords as I have not tracked keywords in any way except to determine which page they were ranking on.

Asher - ur comment is irrelevant, the question is why did the traffic drop. You statement is akin to telling someone they need waterproofs when they standing in the rain, when the question is, why is is raining (why is Google traffic down)

[claybutler]

I 'm a bit baffled by the Start SEO and Stop SEO markers on your chart. Stop what? How can you stop SEO?

[SteveB]

If you had your Google Analytics Account linked to your AdWords Campaign, could pausing AdWords affect Analytics in any way. I wouldn't think so, but that seems to be what has happened here.

[deepsand]

But didnt you check your rankings for the keywords you were doing your SEO.

Of what relevance to the issue of an claimed correlation between traffic fluctuations and the activation/deactivation of AdWords?

Deepsand, of course I have all that info, do you want me to post actual data from adwords and analytics?

We need to see side-by-side organic and PPC traffic for identical time periods to determine how much of any changes are attributable to which source.

If you had your Google Analytics Account linked to your AdWords Campaign, could pausing AdWords affect Analytics in any way.

Setting aside that nothing is yet determined as having happened, the question is, not if pausing AdWords screwed up Analytical, but had an adverse effect on organic traffic.

[Dreamrage]

If I may, can I ask what SEO strategies you were using when you started? Looking at the image, your traffic started rising again when you started with adwords again, but it was a lot harder to gain the traffic you had before you stopped it. I don't mean anything adverse by it, but there are such a lot of grey areas in SEO these days that link building strategies come under fire with Google quite often.