Massive drop in sales - how do I find out why?
-
I am working with my client managing/maintaining their online store.We have been making big improvements to onsite SEO, improved URL structures (complete with re-directs) etc, we use Yoast Premium to optimise pages for search and Yoast Local.
We have a bounce rate of around 20%, however, suddenly in mid August, our revenues virtually vanished overnight. Moz is reporting a search visibility drop of 51%, while visitor levels remain fairly average, certainly no drops that can be compared with the sudden loss of conversions.
I am at a loss and cannot fathom why our sales have dropped.
Can anyone suggest where I might look?
Many thanks
Bob
-
Further to the above, I think I've solved that issue. There was an error on that product you used as your example, it was loading an attribute as a variation that didn't exist.
I've removed it now.
-
Hi Vijay, this is really helpful.
We recently changed the product options framework for the website, and I know the previous options solution had a pop up warning for the completion of the prescriptions fields.
We are now however using a completely different solution for the prescription form, and it's possible that there is some code left over from our previous solution.
I am no longer using the developer who created the previous options framework, so can you tell me if there is a way we can track down where this code is?
For our current options, this is all handled by Gravity Forms in WordPress, so I don't think that will be causing the problem.
Thanks again for your helpful suggestion.
Bob
-
Hi Bob,
Although people are blaming it some Algo update for the drop, yet I would like to keep my focus on conversion rate drop ( if you framed you question correctly, that there is not much drop in visitors compared to sales).
I tried using your website to find anything that was amiss and the only fault I could find which can directly correlate to sales is that Javascript alerts for order validation, If this dialogue is suppressed, validation fails and order can't be processed.
https://postimg.org/image/6axhg8yw5/
Please look into it.
Regards,
Vijay
-
Hi,
I agree with Blue Corona, As there was a algo update few weeks ago, if you check your Google consol you would be able to see.
in my opinion, you need to cosinder update in order to determin the fall. -
Yes, this is an ongoing issue, my client manages their own inventory so they often make changes without me knowing to stock levels/availability.
-
Completely understand the problem!
Another thing I would look at is this: https://i.gyazo.com/f00555df1f7dcc374785d29c8ed4d9cb.png
You can see on that page there are three out of stock products. I would (if you can) push these down the results. As in the top 6 (above the fold) I can see one out of stock. You're missing an opportuntity here to sell that product.
-
Hey Thomas,
Thanks for your feedback. This is a planned update actually. We have a unique requirement where our products require a lot of options to be provided as you have seen. Unfortunately, due to the way the product page is constructed in the theme we are using, it puts those options prior to the checkout button in an area that should only take up the header.
I am about to update the theme to a major update released last week. Once that is done we are going to have a custom product page template created to put everything back in the right place
Currently, because of the options placement, if we activate the tabs section, they appear at the foot of the page!
Complete nightmare!
-
Had a quick look through your shop, found this page: https://www.glassesonspec.co.uk/cheap-prescription-sunglasses/mens-sunglasses/wayfarer-style-cd1038/
I would look into the styling of your page, it's not utilising the width as well as I would think you could. I would personally make the content below the list "included with every pair" use the full width (image/description)
-
I use a spreadsheet to track my top 10 competitors, every time the new DA index is released. By watching our competitors, I can see trends and seasons in our markets and how algorithm changes affect us and them. Most of the time, the majority of us see the same increases and reductions. This is not an immediate answer bc it takes a long time to populate enough data to begin measuring, but after a while, it very valuable when the owner comes knocking.
KJr
-
Thanks Patrick, that's really useful info. I'll try some of these suggestions
-
Hi there
I would make sure that you properly 301 redirected all old URLs to new URLs. If you are not, Google could be having a hard time understanding you moved your URLs. I would then check your robots.txt and meta tags to make sure you aren't accidentally blocking your site from search engines.
Take a look at your competitor with competitor research. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What are they doing that I am not?
- What changes have they made that I haven't?
- Are they leveraging Schema?
- What kind of content are they developing?
- What links do they have?
After that, I would also make sure your eCommerce tracking is properly tracking, sometime this can get wonky, especially with URLs changing. Please review this, especially Enhanced eCommerce.
Lastly, one of my favorite resources for this comes from InFlow with their Rankings and Traffic Drop Checklist. It's packed with tips and places to look.
Start there and see what happens! Let me know if you need more help! Good luck!
P -
Hi Vijay,
No significant changes were made in the period that we feel would have the impact that we have seen.
The website/checkout experience tests fine, we are still receiving a trickle of orders, but not the volume we were enjoying before.
Please see my response to the above reply, it appears we are not the only player in our sector who has seen a drop, several competitors have seen a similar drop in search visibility too.
The website is www.glassesonspec.co.uk.
If there is any other specific information you think would be useful, then do please let me know.
Many thanks
-
hi Bob,
You have not provided enough information or website URL for anyone to answer accurately, anything we reply here would be mere speculation.
Please provide more details about the website and when exactly was done prior to sales drop.
That's the reason, we have culturally created an environment within our organization to LOG everything we do on our client sites.
Regards,
Vijay
-
Hi,
Thanks for your quick response, interestingly, our main competitor saw a 15% search visibility rise, and a few other competitors like us saw a large fall. Does this lend weight to your theory that perhaps it's external factors and the biggest competitor raising their game?
-
Hmm, that is very odd and I'm sure extremely frustrating.
I would use Google Search Console to look at the pages seeing the biggest decrease and see if your ranked position has drastically changed. I would assume either you were hit with an algorithm update or competitors have really upped their efforts which would have impacted your rankings.
Sorry I don't have a more definitive answer, but I hope that helps!
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
-
What Tools Do I USe To Find Why My Site No Longer Ranks
Hi, I made the mistake of hiring a freelancer to work on my website [in2town.co.uk](link url) but after having a good website things went from bad to worse. The freelancer was kicked off the platform due to lots of compliants from people and creating backdoors to websites and posting on them. It cost me money to have the back door to our site closed. I then found lots of websites were stealing my content through the rss feed. Two of those sites have now been shut down by their hosting company. With all these problems I found in Feb that the hundreds of keywords that I ranked for had vanished. And all the ones that were in the top ten for many years have also vanished. When I create an article which includes https://www.in2town.co.uk/skegness-news/lincolnshire-premier-inn-staff-fear-for-their-jobs/ they cannot be found in Google. Normally before all these problems, my articles were found straight away. If I put in the title name Lincolnshire Premier Inn Staff Fear For Their Jobs and then add In2town in front of it, then instead of the page coming up with the article, it instead shows the home page. Can anyone please advise what tools i should be using to find out the problems and solve them, and can anyone offer advice please on what to do to solve this.
Technical SEO | | blogwoman10 -
Find all external 404 errors/links?
Hi All, We have recently discovered a site was linking to our site but it was linking to an incorrect url, resulting in a 404 error. We had only found this by pure chance and wondered if there was a tool out there that will tell us when a site is linking to an incorrect url on our site? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Crawl rate dropped to zero
Hello, I recently moved my site in godaddy from cpanel to managed wordpress. I bought this transfer directly from GoDaddy customer service. in this process they accidentally changed my domain from www to non www. I changed it back after the migration, but as a result of this sites craw rate from search console fell to zero and has not risen at all since then. In addition to this website does not display any other errors, i can ask google manually fetch my pages and it works as before, only the crawl rates seems to be dropped permanently. GoDaddy customer service also claims that do not see any errors but I think, however, that in some way they caused this during the migration when the url changed since the timing match perfectly. also when they accidentally removed the www, crawl rate of my sites non www version got up but fell back to zero when I changed it back to www version. Now the crawl rate of both www and non www version is zero. How do I get it to rise again? Customer service also said that the problem may be related to ftp-data of search console? But they were not able to help any more than .Would someone from here be able to help me with this in anyway please?
Technical SEO | | pok3rplay3r0 -
Website dropping in ranking
Hello My website is www.invitationsforless.ie and on google Ireland it was ranking no 6 for the keyword "wedding invitations" and I was doing quite well from this but it has now has moved down along the rankings to no 10 and I have gone from the first page on google to the second page which is very disappointing. I did recently change the blurb on my homepage - would this have effected it. Please help I don't know what to do Thanks Linda
Technical SEO | | invitationsforless0 -
Tired of finding solution for duplicate contents.
Just my site was scanned by seomoz and seen lots of duplicate content and titles found. Well I am tired of finding solutions of duplicate content for a shopping site product category page. You can see the screenshot below. http://i.imgur.com/TXPretv.png You can see below in every link its showing "items_per_page=64, 128 etc.". This happened in every category in which I was created. I am already using Canonical add-on to avoid this problem but still it's there. You can check my domain here - http://www.plugnbuy.com/computer-software/pc-security/antivirus-internet-security/ and see if the add-on working correct. I recently submitted my sitemap to GWT, so that's why it's not showing me any report regarding duplicate issues. Please help ME
Technical SEO | | chandubaba0 -
My landing pages just dropped to zero in webmaster tools
According to google webmaster tools my landing pages just dropped from 1300 impressions 2 days ago to zero for the past 2 days. Have attached snippet of graph, URL of website is http://www.cheapcentralheating.co.uk - I have no idea whats happened here, and if anyone can advise or help I would be extremely grateful. landing_pages.jpg
Technical SEO | | nicklemonpromotions0 -
Panda and unnatural links caused ranking drop
Hi I have been approached to do some SEO work for a site that has been hit badly by the latest panda update 3.3, they have also had a warning in their Google webmaster tools account saying they had unnatural looking links to their site, they received this in 26 Feb and that prompted them to stop working with their excising seo company and look for a new one. Apparently their rankings for the keywords they were targeting have dropped dramatically, but it looks like just those they were actively building back links for, other phrases do not look affected. Before I take them on I want to be clear that it is possible to help them reclaim their rankings? I have checked the site and the on-page seo is good, the site build is good, just a few errors to fix but the links that have been built by the seo company are low quality with a lot of spun articles and the same anchor text so I see what the Google webmaster tools message is refuring to. I do not think these links can be removed as there is no contact details on the sites I checked I have not checked all of them but a random sample does not show promise, they are from low authority domains. So if I am to take them on as a client and help them to regain their previous rankings what is the best strategy? Obviously they want results yesterday and from our phone call they would rather someone else did the work than them, so my initial response of add some better quality content that others in your industry would link to as a reference did not go down well, to be fair I think it is a time issue there are only 3 people in the company and they are not technical at all. Thanks for your help Sean
Technical SEO | | ske110 -
Traffic drop after migration?
Hi everybody. One of my clients is looking to move their e-commerce site to a new platform in the next few weeks. However, they been told by several sources that traffic will drop after a migration, which they want to avoid in the run up to Christmas. I've not heard this before, and I thought as long as you pay attention to structure, indexing and redirects a migration should have no impact. We'd be moving to a site with cleaner code, so surely there wouldn't be some kind of penalty for that? Your thoughts would be great! S
Technical SEO | | neooptic0