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
-
More Singular KW Targeted Landing Pages vs. Less Multiple KW Targeted Landing Pages
So my question is... I have a adopted a site which currently ranks quite well for some industry competitive keywords with a number of poor quality landing pages which specifically target a singular keyword. I am wondering if its worth merging some of these pages together into one authoritative, better quality landing page targeting multiple keywords (as the intent for some of these keywords are largely the same). What i don't want to do is jeopardise the existing rankings in doing so. The alternative option would just be to improve the content on the existing landing pages without merging. What are peoples thoughts on this? Are there any positive case studies out there where merging has had a positive effect? Any help would be great. Regards,
On-Page Optimization | | NickG-1231 -
Duplicated page titles
Dear friends, We have a problem which occurs on our page with duplicated page titles. Landlords are posting rooms on our page and most of them are giving the same name to the rooms and after that, we are getting more and more duplicated page titles. We are applying random whit this title tag: Accommodation for students in {city.name}: {name}. English title
On-Page Optimization | | Eurasmus.com
Certified student rooms in {city.name}: {name} English title
Erasmus room for students in {city.name} | {name} English title
Student room in {city.name}: {name} English title Also our title tag is sometimes to long but there is no possibility to make them shorter. I think. If anyone would have some idea be free to comment and help us. Kind regards Miško Macolić Tomičić0 -
Any issue with my On page SEO
Kindly review my website and let me know if there is any issue with On page or I am missing anything? Home page - http://www.ayurjeewan.com Deep Page - http://www.ayurjeewan.com/natural/divya-triphala-churna/
On-Page Optimization | | MasonBaker0 -
Duplicate content from category pages?
I have an ecommerce store with different categories for my products. Some products do appear in more than one category, is that an issue even if you end up on the same product page/link? Also, I have a "show all products" category, which I believe creates duplicate content too? What is your take on this? What can I do to solve this? Is it even an issue of duplicate content? All answers are very much appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | danielpett0 -
Dynamic pages on a static html pages websiite
Good evening everybody. I am new on SeoMoz that I find very helpful in my work. I am not a web developer so please excuse me if my technical language is poor.I have an issue that maybe you can help me to solve. I work for a company who has a website, which is old and very well positioned on google for the most important keywords for the field of the company I work for (dentistry). It is a website made some years ago and it's made of static html pages.I would like to add a section in my website where I can post articles, like a blog (I think of a wordpress-style website) with daily posts (so with a dynamic page). Is there a way to do this without modifying the structure of the website and without losing pages, urls and ranking? We're on the first google page for many keywords of interests in our city and it would be a great damage for us to lose those positions.Thank you very much!
On-Page Optimization | | adec0 -
Page Title
My website was hacked last November and then again last week. Prior to the hacking we were at number one in Google.co.uk for our main search term "nile cruises' for years. After last November's hacking we dropped to about position 4 and after last week we are at position 7. Ima rebuilding the lost data and I am having to create new Title and Description meta data for each of the indexed pages. I am taking the opportunity to try and ensure my titles and descriptions are good and the correct length, etc but wondered about the best title format. I set our home page title over the weekend as: Nile Cruise | Leading ABTA & ATOL Bonded UK Nile Cruise Specialist I was going to try and cover 3 keyphrases in the title like this: Nile Cruise | Nile Cruises | Nile Cruise Bargains But I thought that might look a bit spammy because the 3 phrases are very similar. I wondered what anyone else might suggest? Thanks, Colin
On-Page Optimization | | NileCruises0 -
On Page SEO Tool
Hello - I'm looking for one tool that does the following and was wondering if anyone knew of such a tool? In a perfect world I would like to enter in one domain name and have a report generated that shows All Internal links, link titles, and anchor text All internal broken links / redirects All images, image size and image alt, if the image alt is missing. I'd love to be about to export these reports to excel and quickly run my on page optimization. The goal is to produce a checklist for a developer to execute quickly. Thanks for your help Gabe
On-Page Optimization | | Gabe0 -
Some of my pages are ranking for terms which I want other pages to rank for. What can I do to effectively switch the ranking?
Some of the pages are ranking for terms I have optimised other pages for. The pages which are ranking are quite rightly falling, because they aren't optimised for the terms they're showing for. However, I have pages which are optomised for those terms. How do I switch the SERPS to the page I want?
On-Page Optimization | | GlobalLingo1