SIte Redesign - Disaster for Organic Traffic
-
A client just redesigned their site and launched it around May 30. The organic traffic has had a MAJOR drop and has not returned yet. All of the old pages have been 301 redirected to the new pages. Any thoughts on what could be causing this to www.brickhousesecurity.com?
In Google Webmaster Tools, before the redesign we were receiving about 300,000 impressions and 10-12,000 clicks. Now the impressions are only 100,000 with half as many clicks.
Thanks!
-
You'll also want to check whether you have fewer pages indexed now than before the redesign. if you have significantly fewer pages, you'll have lost a lot of long-tail search query traffic.
Check out what search terms brought traffic before, and to what page, compared to after the redesign as well.
Paul
-
You can use the analytics to tell where the traffic drops are coming from but I think that you need to get to why Google or some other search engine traffic is dropping. So I totally agree with what EGOL mentions, but I think you already have a global grasp that traffic has dropped. Here are what I would suggest are next steps to then fix the issues of why the traffic has dropped.
Odds are is that technically you may have a problem going on.
Go through your GWT reports for crawl errors and HTML optimization etc. We relaunched and it gave us all kinds of clues on what to fix.
You need to double check all of your 301 paths - I bet that there are some holes. This is down and dirty detail work. I bet that they are probably not as correct as you think. Don't assume that if you test a few the rest are ok. Dont assume that the developer says that they are working that they are working. Run them through a tool to make sure that you are sending a 301 response. I had a site that was using 302 responses vs 301 (a temporary vs a permanent redirect). Verify, verify, verify.
Did you change title tags on your pages. Titles are a big signal and if you change them, you can see a drop. You can look at your traffic and ranking analysis to look at sample pages. If you did do a radical change, you may want to go back to your original title tag methods.
Run site speed tools
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights#url=www.brickhousesecurity.com&mobile=false
See if your speed has dropped. The GWT will also show over time if your site is speeding up or slowing down. You may need to look at your server setup.
Verify the HTML
Did you setup
It looks like you may have changed a bunch of things at once and so it is hard to tell what you changed so see what was impacted. Usually in cases like this, Google is trying to figure out the changes and so it may take a while to sort out. I just gave some examples, but you need to review everything that has changed and see what the differences are. There are some things, even with a 301 redirects that are correct, if you changed the URL structure and title tags and the new site has HTML that does not validate, Google may take a while to sort it out. I had a site that we did a complete overhaul and it was 6 months before the traffic came back and that was with pretty good controls in place.
Good luck!
-
Here is the key for diagnosing a problem like this.
Do this assessment.....
-
where traffic was coming from before the drop
-
where traffic is coming from now
-
use 1 and 2 to determine what traffic you lost
-
go to those SERPs to see what happened
-
look at your pages to determine the cause
(If you don't have old analytics see if you can get raw logs off of server and look at them with a tool like weblogexpert - free low feature version if you don't want to pay)
The above will tell you if you had a traffic loss. However, your post complains about an impression loss. That is very different. For that use weblogexpert to determine if your problem is really an engagement loss rather than a traffic loss. If that is the case then the new design fails to connect visitors to content as well as the original design. To solve that you need better site navigation and cues that lead to deeper content.
-
-
i dunno how it is for everyone else, but the site was really slow to me. Try using different image formats instead of png's. maybe try jpg's?
we had this as a problem, made a few changes, and our site speed went up instantaneously
other thing is make sure your CSS and javascript are in external files when can be, although its usually the images and other media that are playing the major role in site speed
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Quick SEO Audit of my site.
Hello, I hope you are doing great. I am working on a website that is related to flea collars for cats and dogs. And I want you to make a quick audit of the site where am I lacking. It could be great if you can help ASAP. You can view my site here :
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Request4peace0 -
Huge organic traffic drom after a perfect domain migration. What to do?
Hi, I already asked the question on different places. But so far nobody could help me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dennis1992038
Hope someone can help me out. If possible.
I migrated my website https://vihara.nl to https://meditatieinstituut.nl and lost about 80% traffic (see printscreens). It's over more than a month ago now and there is no sign of getting it back up. Maybe there is nothing to do and
1. I have to be patient and traffic comes back in a few months.
or
2. There is nothing to do and I've lost everything I've build up in the last years. Start over again to get the rankings back.
or maybe, maybe
3. I just forgot something that I still need to do to get the rankings back up. Or there is something I did not think of... This is done: The website is migrated 1 on 1. No changes in content, url, code, etc. Everything is exactly the same as on the previous domain. 301 redirects whole domain (via htaccess a bulk redirect). All the old pages, without exceptions, lead to the exact new page. The new domain is running from CDN (Cloudflare) with the same settings as the previous domain. SSL is installed in the exact same way. Domain migration set up in Search console (working). Uploaded new sitemap (working). Updated internal links. Changed the most important external links (where I could get contact after reaching out) In meanwhile received some new external links and also posted new content Anybody knows what to do? Or do I just have to be more patient and will it come back in a few months by itself? Looking forward to suggetions. Thanks! Gerjan Migratie-Meditatie-Instituut-2048x786.jpg verloop-sinds-de-start-2048x355.jpg0 -
Splitting One Site Into Two Sites Best Practices Needed
Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own. The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter. The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time. Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances. For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
How to avoid adult traffic to site?
A client of ours is increasingly getting a lot of adult traffic to their site, where they show up only for adult searches and not at all for relevant searches. How can we stop Google associating their site with adult content? Here's a blog example, giving advice to parents on girls and body image issues: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/girls-and-body-image keywords driving traffic to this page are all around images for 'young nude girls' etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MediaCause0 -
Google Indexing our site
We have 700 city pages on our site. We submitted to google via a https://www.samhillbands.com/sitemaps/locations.xml but they only indexed 15 so far. Yes the content is similar on all of the pages...thought on getting them to index the remaining pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
Why does old "Free" site ranks better than new "Optimized" site?
My client has a "free" site he set-up years ago - www.montclairbariatricsurgery.com (We'll call this the old site) that consistently outranks his current "optimized" (new) website - http://www.njbariatricsurgery.com/ The client doesn't want to get rid of his old site, which is now a competitor, because it ranks so much better. But he's invested so much in the new site with no results. A bit of background: We recently discovered the content on the new site was a direct copy of content on the old site. We had all copy on new site rewritten. This was back in April. The domain of the new site was changed on July 8th from www.Bariatrx.com to what you see now - www.njbariatricsurgery.com. Any insight you can provide would be greatly appreciated!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhatUpHud0 -
Micro Site Penalty?
I have been carrying out On-Page optimisation only for a client www.shade7.co.nz. After three months or so I have been getting some great results, improving to the top three positions for at least 30 of 45 keywords targeted. Couple of more tweaks and I would be a very happy camper. Disaster overnight! Rankings CRASH! Unbeknown to me the client a month or so back decided to link just about every product/link on a micro site he owns (www.shademakers.com/ ) plus one other site he owns. Explorer I think discovered over 350 back-links (follow) from these sites! As this is a site he owns and it is targeting the same keywords I presume this falls into the EVIL bucket of SEO. Two part question do you believe I am correct that this is the reason for this rankings crash and what would be the best way to resolve this! server-side 301 redirect for the micro site? Delete the micro site (drastic measure) Remove all the links other than maybe one in the contact page saying visit our other site shade7 other options? The client or I have not received any bad link Emails from Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Moving-Web-SEO-Auckland0 -
Website redesign - how do I avoid screwing up my site SEO?
We are preparing to launch a newly designed (and much improved) website in the next few months. I want to be very careful to ensure we do not mess up any rankings (and hopefully actually improve rankings) when switching over the site. I'm particularly concerned about one key phrase that our homepage currently ranks on. After the redesign it would be more appropriate for our of our subpages to rank for that term, but I'd rather have our homepage rank (less relevant for this keyword than the subpage) then nothing at all. I know about 301 redirects, and we are planning on creating a few comprehensive diagrams to ensure we redirect old pages to the correct new pages. Beyond that, what can I do to preserve our rankings? Thanks! -Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanD.0