Organic Traffic down after WordPress switch.
-
I recently switched our company's website over to Wordpress in February. Organic traffic went down....
http://www.screencast.com/t/dJ0Oeyma5Xs
Same content, there are a few different page URLs but most of all it is all the same and I've SEO'd it to pieces.
Any thoughts? I can't figure this one out.
-
I did make the mistake of not re-directing...and just fixed and are looking at the results. The majority of decline was in Google but didn't seem to be a huge ranking loss...hoping I may have just fixed it with re-directs but still too early to tell. Thanks for the input. Will report back soon.
-
Hi Steve
We have to get really specific with what happened - few questions;
- can you segment traffic to show more specifically where the loss was? was it from Google only?
- did the loss occur across all pages? just the homepage? try to get really specific with segments to narrow it down
- of the URLs that did change, were they redirected?
- did things like page titles etc all change, or did you maintain those exactly the same?
- was there ranking loss?
TY!
-Dan
-
the theme is called iBuze and it was developed by Goodlayers. Pretty sure it's clean. Haven't seen any hidden links. Where would you typically look?
-
Hi Steve,
If you have moved the site over to WordPress but remained on a windows server this could be causing the speed problems. Could be because I am in the UK but the site is dead slow and caused time out errors on many pages with the crawl tool I used (Screaming Frog). There are 40 (404) errors on your site - mostly from the e-mail link in the top corner of each page - its broken. Are you monitoring webmaster tools for errors? If that has been broken for a while it could be a factor.
Adding suitable categories and tags to your posts can really help in WordPress. I can recommend this guide to WordPress SEO: http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/
The site is coming up in searches - I am surprised that WordPress did not improve the rankings it usually does, but WordPress can be slow.
Hope this helps
Alison
-
Hi Steve,
What Wordpress theme are you using? Some have embedded links that can hurt your rankings. Other have hidden links, did you check everything out and it's clean from this point of view?
-
Hmmm....looking at it in Analytics, it seems to be about normal. Obviously the lower the better but what is a good site speed?
-
Hi Steve,
I think your problem lies in the site speed.
We had this problem with WordPress we solved it by switching to a linux server from a windows server. Have you checked this?
Good Luck
Alison
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
-
Organic conversions
Hi, Is there any way (Analytics & other tools) how I can see where organic conversions come from? What search queries were used or at least what landing pages converted? Ideally, I would like exact search queries. I know I have list of these in GSC but not conversions. Analytics doesn't provide these so I cannot link them with conversions. Is there any realiable tool that is safe and won't use our data as benchmark or won't offer any form of transparency that will be useful for our competitors. Thanks. Katarina
Reporting & Analytics | | Katarina-Borovska0 -
Google Analytics, Wordpress, Sumo - who to trust
Something is wrong. I have a website that according to Google Analytics gets zero relevant clicks, with most of the clicks it does get coming from Russia. Wordpress says it gets a hundred or so visitors a month, with most traffic going to the pages that I know rank. Sumo says the heat map got 76 clicks. How would you figure out what's really going on?
Reporting & Analytics | | julie-getonthemap0 -
Scary Traffic Drop — Slower at First, Now Much Sharper
Hi. My website, dailytekk.com, has been steadily losing viewers since April. In recent weeks, though, the drop has been much more significant — scarily so. Almost all our traffic comes from Google, organically. In the last 30 days I've lost 135k page views. I'm not sure if we just have content that is getting old, if Google changed something in the algorithm, if we are being penalized, if AMP pages are having a negative effect, etc. I would love to find a great consultant to help us figure this out and get back on the right track. We seem to be losing traffic despite our best efforts at this point. Thanks, Chris
Reporting & Analytics | | dailytekk0 -
Direct / (none) Spam Traffic Help
In July 2015, we experienced an over 1,000% increase in traffic and it has remained like that ever since. It's all spam traffic and I have no clue how to get rid of it. I added in your typical .htaccess blocks from known culprits with little to no effect. Read up on Ghost traffic and applied filters to no effect. The spam is completely distributed as far as I can tell both geographically as well as by network providers. Where once we had pretty decent bounce rates of around 50%, now, since all my Analytics data is meaningless - it's around 90%. I could apply a filter but beyond my GA account providing no insights, I'm also concerned about the increased use of server resources. I'd ideally like to stop the traffic completely. The only distinguishing feature of the traffic that I have been able to determine is browser size. Comparing June 2015 to July 2015 we saw the following: Browser size visits: 620 x 460 = 6,828 vs 0, 610 x 450 = 175 vs 0, 1330 x 630 = 71 vs 1, 1890 x 940 = 67 vs 0, 780 x 580 = 58 v 5. Other than that, I can find no unifying theme to the traffic beyond being traffic hitting our homepage and having no medium. Nothing special that I am aware of happened in July. We didn't do any sort of...really anything. We did have our network compromised by ransomware in the beginning of June, which we promptly ignored and restored backups - at no point did we try to contact the criminals, but I am doubtful there is any connection considering that our website is remotely hosted. If anyone has any suggestions or has seen anything like this before, please let me know. spam-traffic.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | Nivik230 -
Exclude brand Traffic
Hello everyone, Whenever any user searches for our website using brand keywords, session count should comes under direct source instead of Google/organic. Or in simple language, We want that all our brand keyword search traffic should be consider as Direct Traffic instead of organic. Is it possible in Google Analytics? If yes then please share the steps of doing it
Reporting & Analytics | | Obbserv0 -
How does switching to HTTPS effect Google Analytics?
We are looking at making our site HTTPS. We have been using the same Google Analytics account for years and I like having the historical data. All of our pages will be the same, we are just going to redirect from the http to https. Does anything need to be done with Google Analytics? What about other addons such as Optimizely, Crazy Egg, or Share this?
Reporting & Analytics | | EcommerceSite0 -
Why are plus signs (+) suddenly showing up in Google Analytics organic search keywords reports?
Since June 13, 2013, the number of organic search queries containing a plus sign (+) has gone up over 1,000% compared to the previous period on my site in Google Analytics. These plus signs appear to be taking the place of spaces in these search queries (i.e. "word1+word2+word3"). This appears to be almost (or completely) Google organic traffic, not other search engines. Since I highly doubt searcher behavior would change so suddenly, I'm trying to figure out why Google is replacing spaces with plus signs. Is anyone else seeing this? Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | RCF0 -
100% sudden drop in traffic
Hi Guys I've just had an awful fright as Google Analytics is saying my website http://www.clintonpower.com.au has dropped to nil traffic since the 14th September. I've checked Google webmaster tools and all is OK with no malware or Google blacklisting that I can see. Any ideas how I can find out what's happened? This is super scary because 99% of my business comes from Google. I really have no idea what to do next or how to investigate the problem. Is there a way I can submit a query to Google through webmaster tools? Thanks in advance! Clinton Google-traffic.png
Reporting & Analytics | | ClintonP0