We redesigned our website, make it responsive and page views tanked. What happened?
-
Last year, we redesigned our site and made it responsive. Our page views only grew by only 3% (the previous year they grew by 40%). If we exclude homepage views from our calculations, we get a drastically different picture-- and see over 30% growth for both total and unique pageviews. Any thoughts?
-
The first thing I think of is that you're measuring pageviews instead of sessions. If you put a lot of effort into streamlining the user experience, wouldn't you expect a decrease in pageviews as users are finding what they need faster?
I would check a few different things to gain a more complete picture. First, check your sessions instead of pageviews. If sessions are trending the way you expect them to compared to the previous year, then maybe the redesign impacted user behavior so they're hitting less pages on the site.
Next I'd see if there was any differentiation between mobile, tablet, and desktop pageviews that are skewing the data. Since the site is now responsive I wouldn't be surprised to see a difference in user behavior on mobile devices, and that may be impacting your pageviews.
Lastly, why not segment and compare by traffic source? If you can identify a sharp drop from a particular source you might be able to gain some insight there. An easy method of viewing this is to create a collection of pie charts or bar graphs so anyone can quickly see where the change was.
There are other ways you can slice and dice and segment your data to tell your story, but I would start there.
-
Yes, if we remove the homepage, the other pages are doing quite well (and increase of 30%). What would branded searches/visits show? I don't think we are quite big enough.....
-
One outstanding question for me is if you see fewer pages/visit when someone lands on your homepage than when they land on a deeper page? Is your brand big enough to be able to track branded searches/visits?
-
Hi John, Yes, we redesigned homepage (it used to be a fixed width with a carousel). Now it's a full width hero scrolling page. We have increased our social media sources but those links mostly led to internal pages (we rarely lead people to the homepage). I'd try and dig more into the referral sources.....
-
Hi Anna!
Did you do any other site architecture or design changes to your homepage? Sounds like overall your site is performing better (though not as quickly as the year before) with the changes but your homepage had something changed that would have affected this.
That, or if they are unique visitors then you may have lost some key rankings or a key traffic referral source. Or, quite simply, this isn't connected with the redesign and your marketing was less effective in the past year possibly because your resources internally were going towards the redesign.
Have you dug deeper into different traffic and referral sources to see if this could have led to it?
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
-
Toggle Tabs on pages - How to present information to users
Hi all, I can use some help with SEO/UX related question I have got. I have a client who has some toggel tabs on its website. Is there a way to display the relevant information from these toggle tabs when a user lands on the page instead of having the same toggle tab show for whenever a user reaches the page? What I am trying to understand is that if a user searched for "vitamin C benefit" (lets say) in Google and then clicks on the link, the user is presented with the "benefits" tab on the page instead of "side effects" tab. Any help would be appreciated! Thanks
Web Design | | Malika1
Malika0 -
Any body can help me to make my web site seo freindly?
any body can help me to make my web site seo freindly? i have not big budget please email me fabric35@hotmail.com
Web Design | | fabric-fabric0 -
Going mobile: Responsive or different mobile version?
Going mobile: Responsive or different mobile version?
Web Design | | FCRMediaLietuva
Which one should we choose? Should we do responsive design or should we have a different mobile version and go m.domain.com ? http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2253965/3-reasons-why-responsive-web-design-is-the-best-option-for-your-mobile-seo-strategy I just read this article. It seems that the responsive design is OK, but the first comment kills that opinion and says that it is pretty hard to make it OK. 🙂 So I need more opinions? What is best for people and for SEO?0 -
Should i not use hyphens in web page titles? Google Penalty for hyphens?
all the page titles in my site have hyphens between the words like this: http://texas.com/texas-plumbers.html I have seen tests where hyphenated domain names ranked lower than non hyphenated domain names. Does this mean my pages are being penalized for hyphens or is this only in the domain that it is penalized? If I create new pages should I not use hyphens in the page titles when there are two or more words in the title? If I changed all my page titles to eliminate the hyphens, I would lose all my rankings correct? My site is 12 years old and if I changed all these titles I'm guessing that each page would be thrown in the google sandbox for several months, is this true? Thanks mozzers!
Web Design | | Ron100 -
Parallax websites - good for SEO?
A client of mine is redesigning their site using a vertical Parallax & upon doing some research I've stumbled across Drew Barrymore's site: http://flowerbeauty.com/ - which also uses Parallax. What I like in particular is that the site changes URLs as you scroll down. If you go direct to one of those URLs you'll notice unique meta data (albeit poorly optimised). All pages are indexed fine in Google (https://www.google.com/#bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=f8873f78dfbb8c5e&q=site:flowerbeauty.com) I'm just wondering if this is considered ok as the user experience is good and they're not doing anything manipulative, however, there's duplicate content and a potential case of cloaking at hand. I think this approach may be ok for my client for a product features page or a global office locations page since I can break up the sections nicely and split a really long page featuring a lot of content into separate URLs. Whereas Flower Beauty have done it across the whole site... i.e. one page of HTML = the whole site. What do you guys think?
Web Design | | wojkwasi0 -
Do pages with low PA effect DA?
I was looking into raising my firm's Domain Authority and I had a thought. I was wondering if our very low PA pages are bringing the overall DA down? Our homepage is at 43 currently and the DA is 32. We have quite a few pages and I am trimming a little fat in the deep pages currently. I was wondering what would be the result in terms of DA I am also starting an aggressive initiative to blog more and try to attract links through guest posting and HARO (Hep A Reporter Out). I understand that many people will say DA is not a metric your should necessarily build around. But, while I am fighting for rankings in a very competitive vertical, I assume a higher DA is better, no? From everything I have read on Moz over the years, they say that the DA metric is the one that tries to encompass a multitude of factors, similar to the way something more complex like the Google algorithm does. So, I assumed finding small gains in DA could be beneficial to the site's rankings and traffic I tried to go into detail and get specific here because I know how many bad questions are asked daily. Thanks anyone and everyone for the help, I do thoroughly appreciate the Moz community
Web Design | | BossArrighi0 -
Home page is not the highest ranking page?
Our websites do not have the home page as the first page in the search engines. It's something benign like the privacy policy page or the directions page! I've thought of adding no index to the privacy page, but then the directions or contact page would show up instead of the home page. One odd thing I've noticed, is that on our link to the home page on our menu and footer, the link is /default.aspx?mb=rte. But that shouldn't make a difference and default.aspx should rank first, right? What can we do to fix this?
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
Home Page Optimization
I only discovered SEOmoz about a week ago and my knowledge in this area has grown 500% in that time, but I'm still a newbie. I'm looking for whether I have the right general idea or not with my home page in regards to SEO. The page is located at Line.com. The top section with the images is 100% for humans. The next section is where the SEO comes into play. I have 5 different services [sports monitor, free sports betting, sports betting forum, sports handicapper websites, gambling affiliate program] that I offer on 5 different inner pages. What I'm trying to do is have my home page rank decently for my desired terms and then pass link juice to the respective pages. My goal is to eventually have my inner pages rank higher than my home page for my desired search terms. Do I have the right general idea or am I way off? Is this too much for the search engines with all of the links and bold text? Design criticisms are also welcome, and anybody who wants to critique the inner pages would be forever thanked. Feel free to be as harsh as you want as long as it's constructive. Thanks!
Web Design | | PatrickGriffith0