Site Review Please
-
A few weeks back I posted a question regarding a client's website and the very high Bounce Rate. We were looking at about 70 to 80% BR. The site was rough, and so I asked for some feedback that can be seen here:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/high-bounce-rate-on-this-specific-page
Since that time we've changed the WP Theme and the client would like specific feedback from the SEO experts. The BR has dropped by roughly 53% over the past month since we changed things, as traffic has risen by roughly 20%. We have lost some rankings for our targeted keywords, even as nothing has greatly changed on the site other than the theme. But even as we've lost some rankings for targeted keywords, we've gained for others and increased traffic dramatically.
So, what do you think of the new site? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
-
Good point regarding the many links with the same anchor pointing to different pages. We use a WP Plugin to add those links. I should look at changing that. Thanks!
-
Thanks! True about the newsletter. Client wanted it on the Home Page, but since I'm not a designer and this is just a template we couldn't get it above the fold. But I agree on both counts.
-
It's not bad, my main concern right off the bat though is why do you have footer information that's different from the header. That just seemed weird to me and made it come off as spammy.
Also, if you're looking for a lot of sign-ups to your newsletter, I would move the newsletter from the bottom to maybe a subpage. A lot of people are not going to look below the fold and see the newsletter so it's hurting you having it there.
-
I quite like the new look,
its the first time i viewed the site and the colours look great
you have the email down the right hand side i cannot read it , you need to change the colours, it also looks like you have Google analytics installed twice
I also see many links with the same anchor pointing to different pages, just search hypertension why send the same keyword to different pages, could explain some ranking drops as Google wont know what page to favour for those links, and there are better ways to distribute the sites internal linking
Do you really need 3 forms on one page for a newsletter sign up ?
Other than that great job
And Good luck for the future
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
-
Best course of action when removing 100's of pages from your site?
We had a section on our site Legal News (we are a law firm). All we did there was rehash news stories from news sites (no original content). We decided to remove the entire Legal News section and we were left with close to 800 404's. Around this same time our rankings seemed to drop. Our webmaster implemented 301's to closely related content on our blog. In about a weeks time our rankings went back up. Our webmaster informed us that we should submit each url to Google for removal, which we did. Its been about three weeks and our Not Found errors in WMT is over 800 and seems to be increasing daily. Moz's crawler says we have only 35 404's and they are from our blog not the legal news section we removed. The last thing we want is to have another rankings drop. Is this normal? What is the best course of action when removing hundreds of pages from your site?
Web Design | | MFC0 -
Is WP okay for E commerce sites?
Do any of you out there use wordpress for an ecommerce site? I'm getting some mixed reviews on it (but it's the internet, so that's bound to happen). Is there any sort of site traffic or page limit that would make using wordpress a bad idea? Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Pagerank and SERP rankings downhill after site update
Our site underwent a major update in September 2012. We put the entire site in WordPress and did away with our static pages. Then, in February 2013, we moved our shopping cart pages from a subdomain to our main domain (in WordPress). In both cases, we had to implement a massive 301 redirect through htaccess as most of our URLs changed with the update. Our site consists of the shopping cart (WooCommerce), blog, and supporting pages. We noticed traffic starting to drop around the last week of November (2012) and it has steadily declined ever since. None of our shop pages have a pagerank with virtually all them showing a gray bar with question mark. Only the shop homepage has some pagerank -- that too from 4 previously to 2 now. Some of the words we used to rank very well for before, we don't even show in the first five pages anymore. At first, we thought it was a temporary situation that would self correct over time, but it doesn't seem to get better at all. All said, we have lost over 80% of our traffic from Google organic. Upon repeated reviews, the 301 redirects seem to be done correctly and we don't see any serious mistakes that could cause such a huge drop. So the question is are we missing something? Are we not looking at the right places? Any ideas where we might start looking? We're simply looking for ideas and a fresh perspective.
Web Design | | bizmanuals0 -
Major URL changes in new site launch
Hey Guys - we recently launched a new website for a client. Prior, all of their URLs were dynamic via an old-school Cold Fusion CMS. We basically had to rewrite 90% of the sites URLs (site is like 300 pages). The new URLs are SEO friendly and the on-page SEO is strong; but the page rank/authority is starting from scratch from these pages and placement has decreased more most of the new pages with competitive keywords. We set up all of the 301 redirects properly and are actively monitoring in Google Webmaster Tools. **Anything else I can do to lessen the pain and get these pages higher page rank/authority sooner rather than later?**Thanks for all of your help.
Web Design | | NobleStudios0 -
Worth Splitting Up Main Site into Several Microsites?
The company I work for offers a variety of very different products, that are sold to different audiences. Right now (and for the past 4 years) all the products have been listed on one main website. Over the years, we have accumulated over 200,000 links and rank relatively well in most of the product-specific keywords. Still, for business purposes we really feel that having a unique site specific to each product would be more beneficial than having them all on one site. What are the pros and cons of making a move to different subdomains from a main site. (i.e. instead of www.cleanedison.com/solar we would set up a solar.cleanedison.com)
Web Design | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
Unable to set preferred domain, can I verify a site that's already redirected?
I'm in the process of trying to set a preferred domain in webmaster tools -- to set our www version as preferred vs. the non www. version. IT is already redirecting non-www to www, but I get this message when trying to change settings "Part of the process of setting a preferred domain is to verify that you own http://mnn.com/. Please verify http://mnn.com/." While we own the domain, I am not sure how we can have Google access a file at [http://mnn.com/some_file when we are forwarding all requests for non-www to our www site.
Web Design | | Aggie
Note: The apache rewrite predates me and I'm not sure how / why we have two domains set up, but I'm trying to fix the preferred domain now.Am I able to verify the non version once the redirect is in place.Any ideas??? Help???Thanks!Lisa0 -
What do YOU look for when reviewing technical website criteria?
Wanted to get everyone's thoughts on this. One of my clients was asking me what they thought of a certain website design company. They wanted to use this company because their designs were very beautiful but wanted to be sure that contracting them would be the right decision. After I made my formal review and recommendation I thought this might be a great topic of discussion for the amazing SEOMOZ community. So, what factors do you look at when determining which design firms are worth their weight?
Web Design | | JusinDuff0 -
The ideal SEO e-commerce site
Hi All, I am currently writing a spec for moving our current e-commerce website and it got me thinking from an SEO perspective. We are all usually restrained by the current website set-up / CMS and there are things it can never do despite how hard we push for the changes. If you had the chance to start from a blank canvas (like I do currently) what would be on your wishlist?
Web Design | | RikkiD220
