Update on goal conversion rates … Google still at the bottom, sadly Google UK even worse than Google.com ….
| Source | Goal Conversion Rate |
|
google.co.uk
|
15.60% |
|
(direct)
|
16.10% |
|
google
|
19.47% |
|
ask
|
26.55% |
|
conduit
|
28.57% |
|
aol
|
31.73% |
|
yahoo
|
37.16% |
|
bing
|
39.62% |
|
xxx.com
|
42.83% |
|
***.com
|
66.25% |
Well, months have gone by and there was a very quiet time over the sumer, but then I think that the UK was busy with other things 
What I am seeing now is a continued restoration of traffic, in fact Panda now tends to give me more rather than taking any away. Of course, all this might change at any random point in the future but for now things are on the (slow) up and up.
Google traffic is still not converting well which means that despite the traffic recovery, income is still way down. Google conversion is now around 27% so it is creeping up slowly.
This scattergram is quite interesting, it plots average position in the Google SERPs against average click-though … wish I could read into it how to improve things but it didn’t prove as clear cut as I’d expected.
Well, I shall never count SEO chickens, but, the September 18th Panda update (3.92 in old SELand terms, 19 in new) appears to have caused Google to assesses its opinion of our site and decide that its not so bad after all. Like I say, nothing is particularly certain in search engines anymore, which is why I have waited a while before commenting, but so far so good. Sometime about the middle of this month there will be another update … I wonder if we’ll hold our gains?
Meanwhile, Google has been improving the quality of traffic it delivers to us with a 4 percentage point improvement in “goal” completions … the 21% that Google achieves is still way below Bing (43%), Yahoo (41%) and referrals (70%), but its better than it was and I care more about traffic quality than traffic numbers
Well, the good is that Google Panda roamed around on 19th August and we got a very slight uplift … well, its better than a Panda slap … apparently, according to Google, Panda updates will now be more regular and “smoother” so there should be fewer massive rises and falls from this strange creature. Unfortunately, Google have also said that future Penguin updates will have more of a “jolt” to them … still, I’m not sure we’re wildly affected by that. Well be interesting to see how the Copyright infringement penalties kick in though We get most of our news from the excellent Search Engine Land.
Meanwhile, after a beautiful week in our new holiday let at Fistral Beach, I came home to find that I had stupidly left my laptop power supply in Newquay. No problem, I thought, so I rushed to PC World as soon as it opened this morning and looked through the replacement options – in the end I decided on a Logik LNP90WD … 90w laptop power supply, compatible with Dell but also with adaptors for a whole range of laptops – seemed like a good thing to have in as a spare anyway so I bought it – shame that its £20 more in store than on-line but I needed it immediately. Got it home, plugged it in, laptop decided it was not a recognised power supply and so refused to charge the battery. Checked the box “keep your laptop charged” it said, well, it doesn’t. “Compatible” it said, well it isn’t. I can run my laptop on it but the battery will not charge at all … thanks Logik.
Ahh well, back to work, a week’s worth of email to catch up on but War Horse tomorrow and Lion King next week… hoorah!
Google rolls out another Panda data refresh tonight and apparently only 1% of sites should notice. I should feel special as I always seem to be in that small group of affected sites – but I always seem to be the one being kicked.
I have been through all of the “how to be a good site” advice Google puts out and I am.. but Google prefers thin affiliate sites to mine… ahh well. increasingly I avoid searching on Google anyway as it gets fixated on a few sites .. ten results listing only two or three domains is not uncommon .. and Google often thinks it knows what I mean better than I do .. thanks for fixing my searches to show what you want instead of what I asked for 
As for clicking on a Google ad … don’t get me started .. once, just once, I clicked on a hot tub advert .. now it seems like every website can only show me hot tub ads … really? Do you think that’s clever? Or effective?
Well, in a couple of days I will know what the latest Panda damage is… I’m not hopeful of a recovery.. still, the ‘good’ thing is that nowadays I get so little Google traffic that a further downturn can hardly do much harm
So, Panda 3.5 came by around 19th April and we got a small uplift, that was nice. But we had a big drop on 27th Aprilwhich looks like it was relater to the Penguin update (anti-spam – see this article).
Currently, less than half my traffic is provided from Google with nearly as much coming from Yahoo/Bing combined.And traffic overall is down on last month (even on the beginning of this month)
I do find it a little confusing in that every time (well not every) Google does some major update I get knocked back but in between these updates Google has me climbing up the results … curious and not particularly helpful.
Of course, I have to always remember that I work in a volatile area with plays, musicals and concerts coming and going all the time, a drop in traffic can be caused by a play I am ranking particularly well for suddenly ending its run, all that traffic then disappears … usually I can find that in Google Analytics ….
Ahh well, back to the long slog of recovery .. I’m suspecting “duplicate content” rather than “keyword stuffing” in this instance .. but, of course, I don’t know for sure …
Update May 4th: Ahh … things are perhaps a little clearer now … Panda 3.6 snuck out at the weekend, on 27th April, so it looks like that was what got me. Well, in one sense I’m pleased as I still have only one thing to look at (Panda) rather than two (Panda and Penguin) but in another sense I am simply confused … why two Panda updates in 8 days (normally 6 weeks or so)? Why did the 3.5 give me an uplift and 3.6 a slap??
Panda 3.5: I see that in Panda 3.5 several ticket sites (other than us) were amongst the losers
Ain’t it always the way … you publish an update and within a couple of hours things have changed again!
Google have now announced that Panda has been run again to “refresh the data” in their system, in other words to check which sites are “in” and which “out”. We, like everyone else, can only sit and wait to see if we’ve been hit though I get less nervous than I used to
Google has also announced that February saw a broad range of changes across their search algorithms – around 40, some minor, some language/region specific and others somewhat shrouded in mystery.
Anyone trying to follow the Google Panda will realise what a confused story it is … so I am very grateful to the Wonderful SearchEngineLand for producing this InfoGraphic and allowing it to be copied across the web.
This is a concise summary of what Panda set out to achieve and, most importantly, when it did it.
I can report that the changes we made to the SeatChoice and UKTW domains appear to have done what we set out to do, in that traffic is back on an upward trend and, at current rates, will recover to previous levels at some point in the next few months. So, yes, it is possible to “recover” from a Panda slap.
The story is not as simple/bright as that may appear, of course. Although traffic has recovered, sales have not.
Can I blame this on Panda and the Google? No. In all truth I don’t think I can. It is possible that I am now being sent different traffic, traffic less inclined to purchase and more inclined to browse – evidence for this is that I don’t really do well in searches that include the keyword “tickets” but I do do well in general what’s on and tour searches.
Of course, with all the changes I have made it is also true that the site I have now is not the site I had at our peak, so there may be things I don’t do as well for the user as I used to.
My time should now be concentrated on tweaking my content to bring more ticket-hunters my way and making sure that I put as few obstacles in the purchase path as possible ….
This brought us from break-even to broke, but at least I feel under control again – but I will never take traffic (quantity or quality) for granted again …
Ok, so I took my own advice and was patient, very patient, to see all the good things we’d done would have the desired effect on traffic and sales. Now, you might argue that we didn’t wait that long but, to be honest, it was getting difficult to see a way out. When we transferred about 70% of our traffic from UKTW to SeatChoice we saw an immediate improvement in SeatChoice traffic, but not to the extent that we’d damaged UKTW. Over the days and weeks that followed, the improvement to SeatChoice slowly fell away back to worse than previous levels and the UKTW traffic started a long slow recovery.
From this set of circumstances I formed the idea that seatchoice.com was somehow toxic in that whatever I did the overall traffic on that site never seemed to recover, indeed, any new traffic delivered to this site was pretty soon leached away somewhere else. And so, eventually, I came to the conculsion that I was flogging a dead horse (domain) and would never win. Questions asked on the Google Webmaster Forum got answers basically denying that such a thing as toxic domains might exist but I could see no other explanation.
And so I decided, after discussion with interested parties, to ditch the seatchoice.om domain and revert to uktw.co.uk which we have been running since the mid-1990s, which seems to have a great reputation and has been almost impossible to “damage”! A couple of late nights later I had a new clean design up on UKTW (moving it from a “slower than 70%” to a “faster than 68%” site!) and put in place the 301 redirects and edits to kick all the traffic from seatchoice.com to uktw.co.uk
Within a couple of days the loss of traffic on seatchoice.com was major (as expected) but the growth in traffic for uktw was even better – in other words not only did I move the traffic successfully but I picked up some new people en route! Checking some key phrases on several search engines we dropped from the SERPs for SeatChoice where we had been on pages 5 to 10 and arrived, immediately, on page 2 for UKTW … from nowhere! Now that’s impressive. Its only been 4 days or so and yet traffic is up, sales are up and, if this were to continue, the road to recovery would be visible at last! In fact, we’re already better placed for our important search phrases using UKTW than we ever achieved with SeatChoice in months of trying.
This was a hard decision but I think the right one. We are not dropping the SeatChoice brand, just making it a “service” within the UKTW listings – which is actually where it started a few years ago … perhaps we should have stuck with it that way from day 1 … live and learn.
The journey is not over yet, and we’re still deep in the woods .. but at least now I have found a small path …
I have now got over the shock of the October 13th hit … in fact I have spent a lot of time on Webmaster Forum and decided that the hit to me was no worse than to many people … I’m still cross that I was hit, but probably more cross at myself than at anyone else .. well, expect for one website which got a Panda boost and yet I know it has not been updated in two years and currently claims that there is only 1 show on in London which it also claims, incorrectly, ends this month …. useful? I think not
So, what have I been doing about it?
Well, I decided that we were potentially approaching the end game so there was no point in holding back. This time I have gone for a wholesale 301 redirection of UKTW what’s on listings to SeatChoice. Some may think this foolish as UKTW had seen a slow decline where SeatChoice had hit a brick wall, perhaps I should have made the call to move everything the other way? We shall see. I needed to remove the last vestiges of duplication within my own stable so that’s the call I made … from now, UKTW is responsible for the archive and for theatre users (notices, links, etc) and SeatChoice is the What’s On and ticketing service.
The move didn’t go as we ll as I expected in some ways. I was always told that 301 carried all the “link juice” with it so I expected a decline in UKTW to be matched by a growth in SeatChoice .. I got the decline but precious little of the growth. So back to the forum with one further plea for help .. this time I was picked up by someone really helpful, someone who, it would seem, is fairly local and actually cared whether I got it right or not … very, very helpful in that he undid a few misconceptions for me and pointed to some reasonably obvious issues that I couldn’t spot … when you work 8 hours a day on the same site you sometimes fail to see the obvious!
Basically though, I am coming to see that there’s a toolkit that you can use to get just some of the basics right, or at least help you to understand things that might be getting in the way. For me this has come down to
Finally, make some changes, fix what’s wrong BUT don’t tinker for the sake of it … Google takes time to notice changes and also only runs the Panda every now and then (4-6 week cycle?) so don’t expect a change to work overnight – the only thing that will work overnight is a sudden influx of traffic because you got such a great piece of content that people started linking to you … the first article I put up about The River Line (with Charlie and Lydia Rose Bewley) got picked up by the Bewley fans – traffic went through the roof in a couple of hours and stayed high for days … it fell off, of course, and few (if any) of the fans bought tickets, but the links and retweets will be good for me longer term.
And rest …. be patient, if you perpetually tinker you will have no idea what it was that fixed your problem .. and if you do have a clue what worked you can then make it part of ongoing site philosophy … but remember, the days of stability are probably gone, you will need to keep an eye on this in the future
SeatChoice Blog News and Reviews
