Organic Traffic Spike
-
I've been chipping away at the SEO for a client's site for about 6 weeks and a few days ago noticed a huge spike in organic traffic for about a dozen keywords. See attached. Previously traffic was around 20-30 unique new visitors a day. On the 17 it went up to 500+ for 1 day, now it's come back down again.
This spike was not for 1 keyword but for about a dozen. I've never seen this before and wondered if anyone had experienced similar. The site is about 3 months old.
-
Interestingly I can see more keywords than usual in Google Analytics, and they are varied. It's as if the site suddenly went into top 3 for most of its targeted keywords and then dropped back down again.
-
Hi there,
There could be multiple of reasons of it. I would suggest you to dig dipper into analytics to find out the exact reason. You should analyze few things like what are those keywords, which is the landing page (if there is any specific), from which geography you got the most traffic during that day etc.
Here, I am ruling out the possibility of improvement in your site ranking (as a reason) because your traffic has come down again to the previous level.
There is a possibility that your site is ranking for the keywords related to a topic which leads to a lot of searches on 17th like some breaking news, controversy etc. I experienced the same once when we were managing a client site related to travel destinations. One day, we saw a big spike in traffic for a particular city page (1000 times more) and later we discovered that the traffic was because of a breaking news update for that city.
So, intervention Analysis & event analysis for that day may help you to find the exact reason.
All the best.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
When my new website went live I saw a huge spike in traffic for 3 weeks but then it halved again. Why would this happen?
My new website went live on 13th April and the organic traffic levels increased by 110%, staying at that level for 3 weeks. Then exactly 3 weeks later the organic traffic halved again, going back to the same level as the old site. Has anyone seen this happen before or worked out why?! Thanks Viki P2R76O9
Reporting & Analytics | | TWB0 -
How to exclude traffic for a specific mobile device in Google Analytics view?
Hi, Need help on how to exclude traffic for a specific mobile device in Google Analytics view. I have been searching and the only information available is excluding IP address of internal traffic. Is there any way to exclude traffic through a mobile MAC address?
Reporting & Analytics | | Khadija_K0 -
Drop in direct traffic & spike in Adwords, any relation?
So I noticed a significant (around 50%) drop in Direct traffic in analytics to one of my websites (compared to last month). I've also noticed a spike in Adwords for around the same number of sessions. The drop in traffic is pretty much isolated to one specific page, and it is the same page involved in the spike in Adwords. Is it possible that Google was not recognizing a portion of the Adwords traffic? That's the only theory I have, but we haven't changed anything with their tracking or Adwords, so I'm a little hesitant to go with that theory.
Reporting & Analytics | | KiyoW0 -
Separating branded from non branded org. traffic volume
What is the easiest way of separating branded from non branded org. traffic volume? I've created great rankings for a client, and at the same time their brand searches seem to have dropped a lot. How do I present this in the best way since GA only shows little org. keyword info. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Majsan0 -
Loss of referral traffic after change of CMS, host
I have a client that changed from MoveableType to Wordpress. He also changed from a dedicated server to WP Engine. He may have blocked search engines for a week or two, so his organic traffic is down but only by 25%. He's 301 redirecting all of the old pages. The mystery is that his referral traffic from Google is down 90%. It's a popular blog, so that's thousands. It's been going on a month now. Anyone seen this before?
Reporting & Analytics | | Hyper-Dog0 -
Exclude Traffic from India
i would like to exclude all traffic coming from India using Advanced Segment in Google Analytics. How do i go about it ? Will it be applied to future traffic also ?
Reporting & Analytics | | seoug_20050 -
Ideas Why Our Google News Traffic Disappearing?
The traffic to our major market newspaper website from Google News has dropped nearly 100% in the past ten days. Any ideas why might be happening?
Reporting & Analytics | | wlis990 -
Why are we not seeing similar traffic patterns in a new market?
Good afternoon! We have a large real estate site with over 400,000 urls. We do pretty well with long-tailed search terms (like addresses--- 123 Main Street, Atlanta GA) so we get a decent amount of traffic (3,500-4,000 uniques a day). 2 months ago we opened up in a new market (Nashville) and hoped to see similar traffic for that market after a few of months, but so far we haven't. In fact, we only get about 200 visits a day. I can't seem to figure out why it's taking so long for us to generate similar traffic in Nashville that we see in Atlanta. All of the Nashville properties are in our sitemap and are being indexed by Google. Any ideas why we aren't seeing similar effects?Thanks in advance for any help you can provide! David
Reporting & Analytics | | clickscape0