Why would impressions and traffic dropped by 70% after focusing on more specific keywords

Question

Can anyone advise why my impressions dropped and traffic as well?

I used to have very generic keywords such as:

• anti aging,
• anti wrinkle,
• face cream,
• eye cream.

I thought they were bad and made the keywords more specific:

• anti wrinkle eye cream,
• anti aging face cream,
• etc.

Following that change, my impressions and traffic dropped dramatically! I used to get 45+ visitors a day, now I get 15- visitors a day.

What is the way forward? I thought what I did to the keywords was good?

Answer 1

If you look on Google trends, you will see that your new keywords receive a lot less interest than your old keywords:

This is probably because, in general, users are lazy and don't like to get too specific in their search queries unless they have a real need to. Also, different users get more specific in different ways, so while one user might search for anti wrinkle eye, another user might search for anti wrinkle face, which will cause you to lose traffic.

In the future, thoroughly research your keywords before changing them.

Answer 2

Lower traffic does not always translate to bad idea as it might be in your case. Having more specific words and long tail keywords also means that the person looking around might be more ready to buy than someone searching with your old set of keywords.

General trend is if people are looking for infomation, they will be lazy and use the easiest words to search. If they are ready to buy they will get as specific as they need in order to find what they want.

Optimizing your site for the new keywords would make sense if:

1. You are selling something rather than giving people information
2. and if finding products and info is harder to find which I don't think it is in your case. The rarer the information, the more specific people will get when searching. So it would be good to rank for both shorter/broader phrases and long-tail/specific keywords.