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
-
Moving wordpress themes, any best practices on setting up Google Analytics for the change?
We currently have a mess of filters and views in our Google Analytics instance. We have a chance to make a clean start. Wondering if creating a whole new property is a good idea? Or just some additional views? Any other pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | jill.myers0 -
Drop in direct traffic
Hi, I help look after two websites and have been tracking traffic sources for a couple of years. I have noticed that both sites have seen a drop in direct traffic over 2 years. Has anyone else noticed this and do you have a hypothesis as to the reason? Overall, on both sites traffic has increased. Thanks, Amelia
Reporting & Analytics | | CommT0 -
A huge spike in traffic, mainely from social and organic
Hi there, We see this huge spike in traffic to our home page for almost a week now. When I check the source I see a crazy spike in Facebook traffic (25,630% change!!), Twitter and organic. The spike in traffic is to our home page alone. The bounce rate is much higher than avg. and time on page is shorter. Also, no. of new visitors to the site is higher than average. The traffic is obviously low quality and is hurting our site's statistics. Any ideas as to why this is happening? Many thanks in advance, Gal
Reporting & Analytics | | tomedess0 -
Deleted Rarely Visited Pages - Traffic Dropped (Big Time)
Hi folks: I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on a problem I am having with organic traffic. One of our sites has about 500 pages/blog posts. We had about 200 pages that no one was visiting, or only one to ten people had visited in an entire year. As a result, we decided to experiment, and delete any page which had fewer than 5 visits in a year. This resulted in a deletion of about 90 pages.We did this on April 6 or 7 of this year. Two days later, we had a substantial drop in visits to the site. We had been getting about 300 sessions a day. Now, we are lucky to get that in a month. I know there was an algorithm update in late March, but our traffic dropped about two weeks after that, and a day or so after the deletion of the pages. There is a clear demarcation on analytics. I gave it a month, the traffic did not recover, so we decided to restore the pages. Traffic has not recovered and it has been about 3 months now. Does anyone have any thoughts on why we might have experienced such a drastic drop as well as what we might do to recover from it? Thanks very much
Reporting & Analytics | | jnfere0 -
Linked my adwords account to GA and vice versa and still paid search is getting recorded into organic traffic??
Hi Mozzers, I have linked properly my adwords account to GA and vice versa and somehow I can see 3/4 of this paid traffic recorded to organic search. The most confusing part is that I can see 1/4 of the paid traffic under the "paid" metric. At this point I don't know really what should I do? Thank you guys in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Why do I have a lot of direct traffic from MSN and Yahoo with 100% bounce rate?
For MSN I have about 8000 hits of one page and a 100% bounce rate. In the last month I have about 400 hits from Yahoo with a 100% bounce rate. Msn is all different pages, while Yahoo is all the home page. What would cause this?
Reporting & Analytics | | EcommerceSite0 -
A switch from Search to Direct traffic from Feb 2012
I have read about the Google algorithm updates galore in 2012. I would therefore be inclined to suspect a sudden sharp drop in Search traffic this year to be caused by such updates. However, I am seeing what appears to be a direct switch from 'Search' to 'Direct' traffic as of about February 16th this year. There are no specific brand-building exercises or general advertising campaigns happening around this time for the site in question. It seems very UN-explainable? I wondered if there are any thoughts from the various lurking gurus? I have attached GA screenshot.. DjTu1.png
Reporting & Analytics | | MikiP0 -
Search Traffic Drops Before It Improves?
I'm working on a site with tons of great, useful content....the owners of the site implemented a new site layout and design (complete overhaul) and they were lacking basics such as meta descriptions, 301 redirects, and, shockingly, they had the same Title tag for every single page on a site with thousands of unique how-to articles. Unsurprisingly their traffic dropped by about 300%. They generate most of their traffic from people learning how to build stairs, how to install crown molding, and other related matters. Beginning last Thursday I've been performing basic on-site SEO, things like having unique titles for each page and similar tasks. The week from Thursday when I began until yesterday (Wednesday), Google traffic dropped -29.73% - 17,715 vs 25,210 I believe this is a normal part of the "Google Shuffle" -- does anyone have a Matt Cutts link or similar proof that this is a normal part of the process?
Reporting & Analytics | | wattssw0