Sales From Website Dropped Off A Cliff

martindow

I run a small business with most of the sales coming through the web site.  Recently, sales and views of pages are much reduced.  Google seems to have demoted pages so they are no longer getting views.  There are some suggestions online that Google has changed its algorithms and small businesses particularly are suffering.  My products are quite niche so in theory it should not be too hard to get views.

When you search for <product> or <product> <town or county> nothing shows on the first few pages of results.  Previously the latter listed well in searches.  <product> <site name> brings up the site on the first page of Google results, so the pages are indexed OK, but only existing customers are likely to search like this.

Are other people seeing something similar?  I'm not sure what can be done.

booneruk

Have you registered your site in Google Search console? Doing so allows you to see your indexed pages, unindexed pages with problems and other useful bits and bobs.

Google does change its algorithm all the time, GSC should show you major changes over a timeline.

Is google currently showing pages on your site? Try issuing an "All pages on site XYZ" type query.

You would google for site:forums.moneysavingexpert.com to see all indexed pages on this forum. 

A direct link of this example: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:forums.moneysavingexpert.com

Mark_d

martindow said:

I run a small business with most of the sales coming through the web site.  Recently, sales and views of pages are much reduced.  Google seems to have demoted pages so they are no longer getting views.  There are some suggestions online that Google has changed its algorithms and small businesses particularly are suffering.  My products are quite niche so in theory it should not be too hard to get views.

When you search for <product> or <product> <town or county> nothing shows on the first few pages of results.  Previously the latter listed well in searches.  <product> <site name> brings up the site on the first page of Google results, so the pages are indexed OK, but only existing customers are likely to search like this.

Are other people seeing something similar?  I'm not sure what can be done.

I've searched for <sewing machines> <Maidenhead> and the second result is a retailer not far away.  So I have no reason to be concerned.

martindow

Thanks booneruk.  The number of indexed pages is around 1000 and this has not changed much over the last few months according to G Analytics.  The issue is how Google is serving up search results.  Previously many search queries listed well, but now they are not to be seen on the first few pages of a search result even though the relevant web page is shown as indexed and can be easily found if the search string includes the site name.  Potential customers are not going to look very far before giving up or going to a competitor.