Organic Brand Traffic Tanking
-
Hey Guys,
We recently launched a new website in late February. Since then, we have seen a drop in organic traffic from most of our top organic keywords. My major concern is the drop that we've seen from our branded keywords. Since the new site launch, our #1 organic traffic and revenue-driving keyword (brand name) dropped over 31%! It should be noted that all of our URLs changed, however, I've updated the sitemap in GWT and we have utilized 301 redirects on all old URLs. Any insights or recommendations on where I should be looking or what I should be doing?
Thanks!
-
Good to hear Distilled on this one Thanks Mike!
-
301s will preserve the referral data, so it should not be the case that it's being stripped out.
-
I'm pretty sure that if it's a 301 permanent server-side redirect, than it will be seen in analytics as direct traffic. However in the past I've seen a lot of talk about Google seeing the original source of traffic in the first place with the 301 being hidden, but I've had experiences like your talking about and I do believe it's direct. Would love to hear some other SEO brains on this lol.
-
Update
Hey guys. I have noticed that there was a sharp increase in direct traffic that coincided with the sharp decrease in organic traffic. Could the 301s somehow be stripping the referrer URL making search traffic look like direct (seems far fetched, but wanted to throw it out there)? Any experience with this?
-
Yes I saw the same thing. I than took the site and implemented a similar search like the old site so that I could get the pages back and internal linking the site had back in place. This seemed to help my traffic and rankings move back into place.
-
Thanks Brandon! Like you, our old site had indexable internal search pages, which we have excluded from being indexed on the new site - which could be having an impact. I've looked at GA to compare new URLs with the old ones, but unfortunately I am seeing drop offs across ALL pages
-
Thanks Andy, what you said makes sense. It's just alarming when we are so used to having a certain traffic/revenue level and it just drops off the face of the earth. I'm sure there is some kind of period in which Google does not know whether or not to trust the new website, so I'm keeping a close eye on it. Unfortunately, I don't deal with new websites frequently, so I don't have much to go off of.
-
I would also dig into your analytics under content. Start comparing pages viewed so you can start pin-pointing what pages are dropping out of the SERPs in-case you missed any in your 301s. I recently had a situation where I did everything right but the site I was working on had an internal search that was indexable so after looking through my analytics I was able to find out where my drop in traffic was really coming from.
Like Andy said, it's still a bit soon, so give it some time and continually check up on it.
-
can you provide us with a url, it would be useful in this case.
Something to note would be what I consider as the "bedding down" period of a new site, whether 100% new or just a website refresh or a wholesale a website was here and now here is a different one. It refers to the 1 or 2 months following go live (it is similar tto the sandbox theory) where Google doesn't totally know whether to trust a site or not and nor has it indexed every new url yet.
You've done all the right things, you just need to wait and check next month - results won't be instant with this kind of thing ... remember SEO is a Journey and Not a Destination.
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
-
Decline in organic but all other sources up--should i be worried?
We migrated to a new CMS in Feb (put in redirects as needed). Since the migration, organic traffic is down 11% YOY, but direct is up 22%, FB referrals up 1,000% and PPC up 500%. Page views are up 35%. Should I be worried about the decline in organic traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BGR0 -
Does removing large portion of content hurt overall website organic visibility?
Hi everyone, I am wondering if there are any negative SEO effects of removing mass amounts of content specifically in the situation I am about to describe. We have a website that is being converted into Wordpress, however, one particular section that contains a large portion of content (31 pages) have not been transferred over yet. We are very eager to launch the new Wordpress website for lead generation purposes and will gradually re-implement the content over time. From Google Analytics, these pages have not generated a significant amount of organic entrances (~7 ) in the last year. Furthermore, these pages do not contain any backlinks. I would like to know whether or not this would have an overal negative SEO impact on the website even if we 301/create a page for coming soon/310/404 these pages? My gut feeling is no, but I would like to make sure I am not missing anything. Thanks Moz community!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Snaptech_Marketing0 -
Multiple brands issue
My client has his main brand on the domain name .com and then 3 brands that exist on .com/brandA , com/brandB and .com/brandC We created a lot of content for .com main brand and we noticed that brandB copied some of our content and put it on .com/brandB . How to deal with this? Canonical tags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aliciaporrata10090 -
Wise or cluttery for a website? Should our "out of the mainstream" of popular products be listed on our site? (older/discontinued, umfamiliar brands, parts to products, etc...)
For instance, should we list replacement parts for a music stand? Or parts for a trumpet, like a valve button? To some, this seems like a cluttery thing to do. I suppose another way to ask would be, "Should we only list the high quantity selling items that are well branded and that everyone shops for, and leave the rest off the website for instore customers only to buy?" (FYI: Our website focus is for our local market mainly, and we're not trying to take on the world per-say, but if the world wants in, that's cool too.) (My thought here is that if a customer walks into our retail store and they request an odd ball part or item... we go hunting for it and find it for them. Or perhaps another Music Store needs a part? To me, it's ALL for sale,... right? Our retail depth, should be reflected in our online presence as much as possible,... correct? I'd personally choose to list the odd balls on our site, just as if a customer was standing in the store. Another side thought is, if we only list the main stream products... we are basically lessening our content (which could affect our rankings) and would be inviting ourselves into a higher competitive market place because we wouldn't be saying anything different than what most other music store sites out there say. I believe we need to show off our uniqueness,... and product depth (of course w/good SEO & content too) is really kinda it, aside of course also from good expert people and a large facility. But perhaps that's a wrong way to look at it?) Thanks, Kevin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kevin_McLeish0 -
Big hit to traffic a while ago, and slow recovery. Is there anything we've missed?
www.movehub.com We took a big hit to our organic traffic when we implemented an HTML form which included a list of every country in the world, twice. This rolled out onto every page on our website. And it got indexed by Google (webmaster tools showed our content keywords as being those from the form occurring 9000+ times on the site) We've fixed this and the content keywords are back to normal, however our traffic has not yet fully recovered. Is there anything on our site that you think could be sending spam signals to Google, or could be impeding our organic traffic growth?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyCatlow0 -
I need help with a local tax lawyer website that just doesn't get traffic
We've been doing a little bit of linkbuilding and content development for this site on and off for the last year or so: http://www.olsonirstaxattorney.com/ We're trying to rank her for "Denver tax attorney," but in all honesty we just don't have the budget to hit the first page for that term, so it doesn't surprise me that we're invisible. However, my problem is that the site gets almost NO traffic. There are days when Google doesn't send more than 2-3 visitors (yikes). Every site in our portfolio gets at least a few hundred visits a month, so I'm thinking that I'm missing something really obvious on this site. I would expect that we'd get some type of traffic considering the amount of content the site has, (about 100 pages of unique content, give or take) and some of the basic linkbuilding work we've done (we just got an infographic published to a few decent quality sites, including a nice placement on the lawyer.com blog). However, we're still getting almost no organic traffic from Google or Bing. Any ideas as to why? GWMT doesn't show a penalty, doesn't identify any site health issues, etc. Other notes: Unbeknownst to me, the client had cut and pasted IRS newsletters as blog posts. I found out about all this duplicate content last November, and we added "noindex" tags to all of those duplicated pages. The site has never been carefully maintained by the client. She's very busy, so adding content has never been a priority, and we don't have a lot of budget to justify blogging on a regular basis AND doing some of the linkbuilding work we've done (guest posts and infographic).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasonLancaster0 -
301 Redirecting multiple domains to brand new domain
Hi guys, I have read quite a bit of stuff on 301 redirects after Penguin. Hoping someone could help me out. im looking at a way to do a legit 301 redirect without passing the penalty. I have acquired two businesses, business1 and business2, that both had websites that were hit by penguin. Ive anaylsed there backlinks and theres a lot of spammy forum links and comments and I was also informed they were both using buildmyrank. A side note, buiness2 only started using BMR after it noticed business1 have large amounts of high PR links. business1.com was ranking at position 1 till the penguin hit. Business2.com was ranking around page 2 I work in the same arena as these two businesses and didnt generate any business via the internet. When these 2 businesses failed (due to loss of rankings and traffic) i decided to take them over. What I am thinking of doing is 301'ing both business domains to my brand new, zero links, domain which will be the name of my new company. I will combine the content from both sites, around 1000 pages, in to the new one. So my question is, does 301'ing multiple domains, that target the same keywords, and operate in the same niche, look less "spammy" then 301'ing 1 domain? I'm trying to look at it in the eyes of google. It is a legit merging of businesses. Thanks for your help, really appreciate your time
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
What are the best strategies to organize a htaccess full of 301 re-directs
I have a client with a htaccess file that is a total mess! What are the best practices to organize all the re-directs, and make it more manageable in the future. Any resources would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anchorwave0