Web traffic in steady decline since launching responsive design in July

[Peter.Huxley59]

The launch of the responsive design is the only event we can correlate to the beginning of the decline in overall visits to the website since July, however we're not sure if this is the issue.

To give you some background, the website http://www.precisionpestcontrol.com.au/ is a pest control site in a highly competitive industry where there are many black hat tactics going on with huge keyword competition on a small range of keywords, however historically the website traffic for the above site has been gaining momentum.

We create/ update 2 or 3 pages every month with rich content and post 8 blogs every month on pest control related topics. We have done the initial keyword research and all the keywords we used are medium to high volume terms.

We don't do any black hat tactics or dodgy link building, we have invested time submitting the site to legitimate business listings in the past. It just seems strange that all of a sudden we go responsive and start to lose searchengine traffic.

Possible Issues

What we've been able to find so far were some pages that were not redirected properly, probably about 5, and 2 pages that seemed to lead to a 404 error. These have only just been fixed recently, otherwise the mobile site has been functioning effectively.

Could this be the reason we have been in decline over the past few months?

We also seem to have lost a whole lot of external links somehow, the external link measurement in MOZ has gone from 1500, up to 6,000 then down to 300 or so in the space of a few months.

Basically we're trying to figure out what we're doing wrong, or what we can do to try and stop the decline of visits. We've checked the algorithm updates and don't think that Panda or the shift to the Google AI would have penalised us, but then again we could be wrong.

Any advice anyone could offer would be hugely appreciated. Happy to provide any data for anyone to have a look at.

[Peter.Huxley59]

Hi Bridget,

Thanks for the response.

There was no migration, all the URL's stayed the same, we just applied the responsive design to the current platform, so not sure if it was the responsive design that somehow got us started on the downward slope.

[DougRoberts]

Hi Peter,

First point, the headline traffic numbers are a pretty lousy metric. Do you have goals set up?

Over the last few months I've seen the volume of search traffic arriving on my site diminish, but at the same time I've seen the number of conversions stay the same and the average engagement metrics have improved. It appears that yes, we may be getting less traffic, but that the traffic we've lost is less relevant, with weak/poor intent.

In order to get a grip on what's happening on your site I'd recommend that your segment your traffic, drill deeper into the data and try to understand what exactly has changed.

What does the traffic (and engagement) look like across device types? How has this changed compared to before the site update? (And out of interest, what drive the decision to make the site mobile responsive?)

How much of your traffic comes from outside of your service area? Has this changed since you removed your location landing pages? How much of your traffic comes from locations that are not relevant to your business?

I also notice that you once had a whole bunch of geographical landing pages. When were these removed? It also seems that they were redirected to a page that no longer exists.

For your organic search landing pages, which pages have shown the greatest decline? Is it limited to your home page or specific pages on your site? Have those pages changed at all?

If you have Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console) set up you can then look at the pages showing the decrease in traffic, look at the queries that those pages are appearing in the search results. How relevant are these specific queries to your business? Are you tracking any of them? How has your visibility changed since the update?

You mention that there were some pages that changed, and that these were only recently redirected. this could be a problem.Were any of these pages previously responsible for a good proportion of your inbound traffic?

As well as considering changes in inbound links from third part sites and changes to the on-pages content (or pages being removed) have there been any changes to the on-site navigation?

Let me know if you have any questions - I'd be happy to take a quick look at your data if it would help.

Doug.

[bridget.randolph]

Hi Peter,

What was your process for shifting to responsive, was it a migration? As in, did you have a separate mobile version which you then redirected to the newly-responsive www. version? A different URL structure which changed with the redesign? or did you simply have a non-mobile-friendly design of your site previously and you redesigned it to be responsive but kept all the URLs the same etc? If there was a migration involved, you may be seeing an impact from that.

[Peter.Huxley59]

Hi John, appreciate you responding.We use Google Analytics and we have a couple of years of data to compare, which I've screen shotted and uploaded here
http://imgur.com/zfJWifh for you to have a look at. Basically in the pest control industry there are times in the year, usually during the warmer months, when pests are most active so there is always a spike en web visits from about September though to February and then it dies off a bit during winter.

Historically however, we have always been gaining traffic, and each year the spike in visits during the warmer months is bigger than the year before. This year however you can see (the blue line) that instead of gaining ground like we usually do, we're now heading in the opposite direction. We haven't changed any settings on GA and the drop in traffic according to GA has been mostly seen in the organic search results as can be seen in this summary for the same time frame as the graph http://imgur.com/ckwvq2f

I've also included a comparison of the last 2 months VS the same time period last year http://imgur.com/ahAYzYD

We've also had a serious dip in MozTrust and MozRank.

zfJWifh ckwvq2f ahAYzYD

[ClaytonJ]

Your traffic appears to have gone up according to similarweb. Where are you measuring traffic in webmaster or ga? Have you changed any settings in GA to exclude spam at any stage?

Or are we talking a ranking drop or traffic drop for the money keywords. ie I have you ranking for the money keywords just on page 2 etc. ie sydney pest control - ranked 20.