One of my clients is Art Prints America. We’ve been working together since August 1, 2011, focusing our efforts on link-building for 3-4 main keywords to his home page www.artprintsamerica.com.
Almost immediately, we got his site in the top 10 for 2 of the keywords. We began to see some traffic from these keywords. On the surface, it appeared everything was working fine, but over time, we have seen the opposite is true. Check out this screen shot which shows the daily Google organic traffic from May 1 – September 18, 2011.
As you can see, starting in mid-August, there has been a dramatic drop in overall Google organic search traffic. After discussing the situation with my client, we decided that it is possible that while we have definitely gotten traffic from our main keywords, it appears as though we are not getting as much traffic from all the random long tail keywords that the site used to get. Why did this happen?
This is what we aim to find out. One thing we have not done is create any deep links, creating backlinks to the inner pages of the site. On other client sites I do work on, I have done a lot more deep linking for various keywords, so this may be a reason.
The other thing we are seeing in our rankings is that after some initial success getting to page 1 of Google for our target keywords, it has been very difficult to get any movement, as we are playing in a challenging, competitive market with aged sites that have thousands of natural and organic links, as well as aggressive PPC campaigns.
We are thinking that by narrowing our niche down to 1-2 higher traffic keywords and creating more volume of quality 1-way backlinks that we may get more overall traffic.
I’m not too proud to write this post, as I do not consider myself to be an SEO expert. It’s clear to me that SEO is more than just getting your client to rank well for a few keywords. Together with my client, we will work together to try to get the search traffic back up, so that he can sell his beautiful giclee art prints online.
When I have some news about our strategy moving forward, I will report it here. In the mean time, if you would like to contribute or share your experience, maybe we can help each other.