Why have we taken such a hit on page visitors?
-
One of our customers owns a stationary company, URL (http://www.costcuttersuk.com) which targets schools and education. In September my company launched a new website for our client with an external company providing SEO.
Since the switch the customers feels they have completely dropped from the rankings and from looking at the Google Analytics reports it has become apparent that they have taken a huge hit on the amount of traffic coming into the site, almost 500 fewer visitors per day.
What is interesting is that the average time spent on the website has increased as is the same with the bounce rate yet everything else has taken a drop.
The platform it has been built on is Opencart , The only thing I can thing that is causing the issue’s is the page load times. They are 62% slower on the home page would this have such a huge impact?
I look forward to hearing your feedback.
-
Yes, that's a lot of redirects. However, I wouldn't advise removing them just because Google has updated their index. You may still have a lot of backlinks pointing to the old URLs. If you remove the redirects, they'll be broken links.
Is it possible to use wildcards to cut down on the number of redirects?
-
Cheers Hutch, I will have a look into that.
-
Thanks for the feedback Laura, Our developer implemented the 301 redirects however I have been informed theres around 6000, 301 redirects in place on the website. My next question is would be are 301 redirects permanent? I assume once Google has indexed the new pages I can remove the redirects I am right in thinking this? If i am what is the time period that you remove the redirects.
I don't have a great understanding of what the other SEO company has carried out other than clearing any 404 errors, suggesting Meta Titles and descriptions for certain pages and suggesting our client add's new content.
The traffic was on a small decline before the new website went live, but it seem's to have carried on decreasing rather than increasing and companies that haven't been established for half as long with a much lower page rank and authority are appearing higher on the SERP's. Which is really frustrating.
I'll check out the Panguin tool.
Thanks again for your response.
-
Given what you've told us, there are any number of reasons why you have seen a dip in traffic. In addition to the load time (which would definitely have an impact, as Hutch says), I would check the following:
- Did you set up 301-redirects properly when you launched the new site?
- Did the internal link architecture change in any way with the redesign?
- What has the external SEO company done?
- When did traffic start to decline? Sharp decline? Gradual decline?
- Are there new competitors pushing the site down in the SERPs?
- Does the dip in traffic correspond to any algorithm updates? (Check the Panguin Tool.)
-
Your page has thousands of 301 redirects - this could be slowing it down and affecting ranking.
-
Increasing your load time by more than half will definitely have an effect on your rankings.
Instead of looking at traffic, why not look at conversions. There are ways of spoofing traffic that is no good, who cares if they lost 500 visits per day if none of those visits were buying their product or partaking in other conversion (email sign up, content interactions). I would look deeper into the traffic that is lost, see where it was coming from and what it was doing on the site to see if you lost useful traffic or not.
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
-
Pages for similar keywords?
I have a site that wants to target the keywords listed below. They are a small company with just a few ski chalets in Val d'Isere, a ski resort in France. They don't have ski chalets in any other ski resort. Val d'Isere chalets
On-Page Optimization | | Marketing_Today
luxury ski chalets
luxury ski chalets Val d'Isere
catered chalet Val d'Isere
catered chalet val d isere
catered ski chalet val d'isere
catered ski chalets
chalets in Val d'isere
chalets in val d isere
luxury catered ski chalets
luxury ski chalets Their domain name includes "valdisere" but I can't get this site onto Page 1, it keeps lingering on Page 2 and 3. I wondered how you would approach this site with pages? Would you reply on the homepage to rank for all these terms or create seperate pages for the terms, and if so how would you group the terms per page?0 -
Welcome Page - Forbes.com
Would love the group's opinion on the Forbes.com welcome page (http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml) redirects to the actual home page after 20 seconds. SEO implications for this tactic? Does it impact the home page rankings? (Positive/Negative) Any input is appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | SEO5Team1 -
123 keywords for a page
Hey mOz fans , I have a site that has 130 keywords. can ı target this amount just incoperate them as Ryan discussed Before.
On-Page Optimization | | atakala0 -
Too many links on page -- how to fix
We are getting reports that there are too many links on most of the pages in one of the sites we manage. Not just a few too many... 275 (versus <100 that is the target). The entire site is built with a very heavy global navigation, which contains a lot of links -- so while the users don't see all of that, Google does. Short of re-architecting the site, can you suggest ways to provide site navigation that don't violate this rule?
On-Page Optimization | | novellseo2 -
How to get rid of those duplicate pages
Hi eveyone Just got my first diagnostics report and i got 220 duplicate page titles and 217 duplicate content pages. I know why this has happened it is because i did play about a bit and did originally have:- www.mydomainname.com/index.php/alpha Then i change the page path to:- www.mydomainname.com/alpha Then i change the page path to:- www.mydomainname.com/category/alpha So now when i get crawled i have 3x duplicate page titles, descriptions and page content. Even when i have put 301 redirects to my preferred domain path. Which is hurting my seo, right? How do i stop theold domains from giving me these bad reports? The site is on Joomla Thanks guys Oujipickle
On-Page Optimization | | oujipickle0 -
Old pages
I have a site where I have 5,000 new products each year, I never waned to deleted the old pages due to links pointing to them and keywords. But I now have 20,000 plus pages, does having that many pages spread out my link juice or does it effect me in any other ways over having a site with 5,000 pages or should I keep not deleting old pages so I dont loose any links? Along with that I currently do not link to my old pages from my site so Im guessing google does not get to them very often if at all, if you agree to still keep them should I link to them somewhere? Because the products are not that simiiar and they do bring added value I dont think canonical would work here
On-Page Optimization | | Dirty0 -
SSL Necessary on Every Page?
Our ecommerce site is currently set up with an SSL on each page. My understanding is that these would need to be removed on the pages that I'd like a 301 redirect to be placed on. As of now, we have 302s due to the SSL. Do I need an SSL on every page or just the checkout pages? Any real benefit to having the SSL on every page?
On-Page Optimization | | NiallTom0 -
Linking Back to the Same Page
What are the other seo's opinions on linking the same keyword you are targeting lets take an example like Trampolines. So we have a Online shop selling trampolines would you feel it a good or bad thing to link the keyword trampolines from the homepage to the homepage almost creating a loop. Some SEO's say yes some say no ?
On-Page Optimization | | onlinemediadirect0