I redesigned a clients website and there is a pretty massive drop in traffic - despite my efforts to significantly improve SEO.
-
Hi there,
I redesigned a clients website that was very old fashioned and was not responsive. I implemented 301 redirects, kept the content pretty similar, website linking structure very similar - the only things i changed was making the website responsive, improved title tags, added a bit more information, improved the footer and h1 tags etc..
however although clicks are fairly similar search impressions have dropped about 60% on average over the past week.
The old site had some keywords linking to pages with no new content so i removed those as seemed like black hat seo tricks and also there was a huge list of "locations we deliver to" on the homepage followed by around 500 citys/towns I removed this. Could this be the cause for the drop? as i assumed those would do more harm than good?
Fairly new with SEO as you can probably tell. Looking for advice on what may be the cause and what steps I should take now.
Thanks for reading!
-
@badgergravling Can you suggest, if adding a forum will give any extra benefit to my main website's popularity?
-
Thanks for your reply Dan.
It's an International site. Our target audience is from India, Middle East countries, and East Asia.
Google has indexed https version and looks good, but after all the on page optimization also, the traffic not going up, however, we are ranking for more keywords than ever.
I've attached the screenshot of traffic stats from Jan to June, if that will help pinpoint issues.
Thanks again
-
Hey Logan,
We did a redesign+migration from as.net to Wordpress. We launched in February 2017 & still struggling to get back where we were. Almost 80% traffic loss.
Any specific pointers that get missed during these kinds of migrations, is it normal to loose this much traffic?
Please help
-
Is it a small, local type business by any chance?
Despite what a lot of best practice will say regarding location pages - they still work for a lot of small, local busineses, particularly in uncompetitive niches. Generally, I'd say 500 cities/towns is massively overdoing it, and there are a lot less spammy ways of achieving something similar, but it may well have contributed to the hit...
If the clicks are the same, then actually it's fine. No one was visiting and buying via the impressions you've lost. However, I'd say it's worth looking at the location/local SEO optimisation again and redoing it in a less spammy way to ensure your client won't panic if they ever look at impressions in Google Search Console (Pretty unlikely for most clients)...
-
Hi Logan,
Thanks for the response! Haha. That is what i thought originally, however I read that a drop of around 5% is normal so 50%+ had my alarm bells ringing! (although the website only has a small amount of traffic)
There was a few other factors that worried me like the old site was .htm but I .301 redirected every page to the new ones with .html
I will try not to worry and hopefully things will improve within the next week or so.
Thanks again.
-
Hi,
Patience, young padawan, it's only been a week
It's basically impossible to redesign a website without some organic traffic loss. There's a lot for search engines to consider, everything they previously knew about your website is gone, they have to learn your new site architecture, URL structures, content, meta data, etc. etc.
It sounds like you covered all the most important bases and got rid of some old school tactics. Give it some time, you should start to see a rebound in a few weeks. The worst thing you can do is panic and try to fix a bunch of stuff that isn't actually broken.
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
-
New Service/Product SEO and rankings
Hello, fellow MOZers. We are a web design company, and we had SEO as secondary service for years. Due to changes in the company we started pushing SEO as one of our main services about 6 monhs ago. We have separate page , targeting that service, as well as case studies, supportive information pages, even SEO Center, which is like a blog about SEO only. We are not using black hat SEO, doing honest link earning and building, don't use keyword stuffing, everything is by the book. I understand that SEO takes time, especially for a company which has a footprint as web design company, not as SEO company. We are ranking very good for web design related keyphrases, however, we don't see any improvements for SEO related keywords. It always was and is between 25-30 SERP. At the same time, competitors, who are ranking on first page for SEO related phrases are pretty bad looking. Design-wise as well as blackhat-SEO-wise. Everything is keyword stuffed, UX is horrible, prices are ridiculous. So, do you guys have any thought/advise on how we can see results / why we are not seeing results. Links: Google search result: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=seo%20houston Competitors: www.seohouston.com, www.graphicsbycindy.com Our pages: https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com/seo-houston.php, https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com/seo-houston/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seomozinator0 -
Why a drop in certain keyword but not others?
Hi. I am looking into a potential clients SEO issues and reasons why their rankings for specific keywords that they ranked for have dropped but others stayed the same or sometimes have improved. They received a manual spam action that was revoked after some disavow and so on. In May of this year they noticed a huge drop in more generic terms. The main keyword that was ranked 6th, dropped to 35th yet other keywords rose slightly. I have noticed this issue for another potential client as well. They ranked 1st for their brand name, then received a spam action that was revoked. Now they do not rank for their brand name but do for other long tail keywords? Any ideas the best way to investigate this or root out the issue and build to improve rank for more generic keywords? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | YNWA0 -
Do sitewide links from other sites hurt SEO?
A friend of mine has a pagerank 3 website that links to all my pages on my site on every page of his site. The anchor text of all these links are the title of each page that it links to. Does this hurt SEO? I can have him change to the links to whatever i want, so if it does hurt, what should i change the anchor text to if needed? Thanks mozzers! Ron
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ron100 -
On page SEO? (This is good! I promise)
I have been doing some research on onsite optimization and I hit a dead end, need some help with OnSite.... These three I get for the most part... (If you would like to add anything please do) Title optimization - needs to be unique with keywords included under 90 words Meta description - needs to be unique with keywords included under 150 words Meta keywords – all keywords Questions begin here... H1 headings – Should this be the first thing the spider crawls? Should they be unique? Is there a penalty for having this content the same on every page? (H1s are under the logo at the top of every one of my sites pages) H2-H6 headings – Should they be unique? Is there a penalty for having this content the same on every page? Bold text – does this matter for SEO? Italic text - does this matter for SEO? Link anchor text – These are the same on most pages. However, most of these links are part of the navigation, does this matter for SEO? is this duplicate? how does the search engine analyze this data? Image alt attributes – I have the share image buttons on my site (Facebook, Twitter, etc...) and they have the same alt attributes on each page. Does this matter for SEO? Body text – I found a competitor site that’s ranking #1 for a key term. This competitor has 11,106 words in their body with the keyword mentioned 29 times (0.8%). They placed all this text in a small scroll down on the bottom of their page. Its strange how they included it. Please review attached image. the competitor URL is http://www(dot)1804design(dot)com/ w6AiM.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Contacted by an SEO company..
We have been contacted by a free SEO company, who seem to use your domain and create articles for you on your site, linking to other relevant sites, while other relevant sites link to yours. All they ask is a small link on your homepage. An excerpt of the instructions are: Download the attached files in a folder to be uploaded to your server (public_html) folder Set 777 permission to the folder. This allows our script to work on your site Add the "site wide" link on your homepage, as well as on the inner pages, the same way we do in the article section. Implement the "site wide" link following the instructions on the README.txt file Copy the script on the file or you can provide us with a temporary FTP access to your server and we will do it for you. Please note that if you can upload our folder to your site within 48 hours, you will be eligible to receive 20 bonus links for your SEO campaign. Should we tread carefully?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | filarinskis0 -
Does your website get downgraded if you link to a lower quality site?
My site has a pr of 4. My friends site has a pr of 2 but I think that he is doing some black hat seo techniques. I wanted to know whether the search engines would ding me for linking to (i.e., validating) a lower quality site.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jamesjd70 -
How do you keep a record of your onsite SEO changes
Hi Everyone, I'm new to the whole SEO process, so was wondering if anyone can help me. I want to keep a record of all SEO activities in one place for the website i'm trying to optimise for. I have created an excel sheet which have the follwoing tabs -Overview & Rankings
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mcliddy
- Keyword Research Competitior Analysis
- Keyword Distribution Map Onpage SEO Link Ideas Link Research
-Link Building Log
- PPC Campaign Does this all seem correct?
Could anyone help in telling me what process you do to keep a record of all SEO onsite activity? I hope this isn't a stupid post, but help would be very much appreciated Many Thanks Matt0 -
HELP! My client got a DDOS Attack! Need advice
Here the setup: Server is hosted inhouse. It got attacked using a DDOS from 20+ IP addresses spoofing in different counries. Our server overloaded and didn't work anymore. URL is registered at GoDaddy. Signed up at Dreamhost. We pointed DNS to Dreamhost successfully. Attacks kept coming and messed up other sites on the Dreamhost shared server. We didn't know we were being followed at first. We originally thought they were attacking the IP address on our inhouse server. Dreamhost noticed the attack and put us on a seperate IP and disabled our URL until the attacks 'stopped'. MY QUESTION IS: What do I do if they don't stop? Close shop? 99% of the business is internet driven. This has to be the blackest Blackhat SEO ever.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Francisco_Meza0