243731 Resource 214 24 1 1255737869397 1255738104492 Controlled Site Traffic Down? Take A Look At Your Competitors

While good content is key and content presentation design is critical to search performance, competitors are sometimes the greatest cause of traffic reductions.

Customers and prospects call me all the time wondering why their traffic is down. They assume it’s something they’ve done (or not done) and they rarely think about outside forces. The idea that you (and you alone) are the cause for traffic reductions is just as silly as believing that you are the cause for the increases. Indeed, you can influence traffic, but any belief that you are the master of your SEO domain is an incomplete version of reality. There’s a coin-flip chance (or better) that any drop in traffic is likely to correlate with a change in your competitive landscape. Furthermore, you must drill beyond the permafrost to understand causal indicators. Fact: traffic dropped; but traffic from where? It’s important you first isolate the nature of the drop before jumping to any conclusions. Is the drop mostly in organic search referrals? Is the drop mostly from one search engine? Is the drop mostly from a particular portal that always drives visitors to your site? There are dozens and perhaps a hundred causes for traffic dips. Here are some things you can to do isolate causal effects of traffic or ranking changes - specifically those related to competitive pressure. <ol> <li>Search for your preferred key-phrases; note the competitors that rank above you and below you. Repeat this process weekly for a month to understand who is scoring higher and thus pushing you lower. Plot the top twenty positions on a graph; after four weekly measurements you’ll likely see a pattern.</li> <li>Investigate the competitors that flow into the top twenty looking for clues why their content is performing so well for each important key-phrase. Note the page titles and other meta-tags that caused this content to invade your space. You’ll likely see a pattern.</li> <li>Create intelligence channels that focus on these competitors and watch for new product announcements, news, and content items that are likely to put pressure on your own competitive posture. MyST provides automated intelligence-gathering channels to do this, but you can also craft a less-elegant solution with Google Alerts.</li> <li>Compare your social media performance with your website performance to see if both content bodies are experiencing similar loss of traffic. If one is performing better than the other, try to determine the key differences; there’s probably a clue in there.</li> <li>Subscribe to HARO (<a href="http://www.helpareporter.com/" target="_blank">Help A Reporter Out</a>) and watch for new articles that journalists are working on; get ahead of relevant stories in your industry by creating key-phrase-intensive content in advance of the release of these articles. MyST provides a service called PR-Connect which does this automatically and alerts you to upcoming articles in your industry.</li></ol> Studying your competitors in terms of traffic is a key performance indicator – don’t assume the problems are related to your site, it’s SEO-ness, or its design. 10 application/xml competitors SEO traffic drop false MySmartChannels/6 (mailto:info@myst-technology.com; MyST Blogsite MetaWeblog API 6.00.0627) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 bfrench 205.145.142.198 false true false false true 190014 false false true false false false true 243739 Resource 190014 173239 1 1255748781973 1255749258752 Controlled Take A Look At Your Competitors: maybe there are more.

My traffic is down as well.  I was up to 21,000 page views and then they went down to what seems like a steady level of 15,000 per month. I was at first concerned and wondered what was I doing that caused it.  None of my competitors seem to be doing better, quite the contrary, but there are more weblogs out there and I believe this is the reason: not better competition, just more of it. While I did like the higher number, it was not that that mattered most.  It was the return I received and that number increased.  So, We had less page view and less individual viewers, but more business was generated.   Less traffic is not always bad.  It's the quality of the traffic that matters. 10 application/xml false Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 GTB5 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 98.165.107.13 false true false false true 243742 Resource 190014 1 1 1255750063033 1255750094754 Controlled RE: Site Traffic Down? Take A Look At Your Competitors

Good point Artur. Another thing to consider is the nature of your content. It's quite possible that as you shape your content to focus on specific prospects, you increase the likelihood that you will subtly narrow your audience (e.g., focus on who really matters), thus decreasing traffic while increasing the odds you are reaching only the people that matter in your business.  10 application/xml false Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_1; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.3 Safari/531.9 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 $Admin 173.160.40.189 false true false false true 214 blog blogsite/MySTHome/web