Sudden drop in traffic since website redesign – can't spot double firing sessions pre-update

[landport]

Hi all,

We launched an updated website around mid-April and have seen a long-term drop in unique page views and sessions since then. Between 25-35%. Page views returned to normal within a month, however. In terms of acquisition, we've not lost referrals or direct traffic, just organic sessions. I haven't seen any significant Google updates except for 'Fred' but that was in March (pre-website update).

We did have to do some 301s and fix up an HTML and XML sitemap, etc, post launch – but that's been in place for a while now so shouldn't still have such an effect? We are also struggling with load speed at the moment, working on this at the moment. Didn't think this had a such a significant impact on ranking however. We've lost mostly non-UK traffic, especially USA.

We're actually climbing rankings for a lot of new keywords I'm targeting, so I can't see how our SEO has been hampered. Frustratingly, I wasn't using Search Console or Moz Pro before this update, so can't compare much in the way of keyword traffic (I know I feel very silly now).

I don't know if it's a reporting issue (I wish it was). I mean we had both GTM and GA tags on the website (I didn't know this until I looked into it) but these were present post website-launch. And I haven't found enough double firing sessions or page views to suggest we used to be getting double figures anyway.

Before this, we were ranking brilliantly and getting more organic traffic than ever.

All the best,

[landport]

Hi Cristian

1. I really don't. I've tried to narrow down which pages are losing traffic from search but it seems fairly even. If anything, the pages which have lost the most traffic have been receiving lots of on-page optimisation since the launch.

2. We had a lot of meta-descriptions that were too long, a lot of duplicate titles, a lot of irrelevant information and also had a need to change a lot of meta-data (and other data, e.g. document text) – this is because I found keywords relevant to our products which had the most monthly searches (via Moz Keyword Exporer) and then used the On-Page Grader to optimise for these keywords. To that end, I haven't an exact figure of visits I'd like to see per keyword, but I have distinguished between good and bad keywords.

3. I used Search Console to crawl for 404s and went through the list one by one.

4. We have improved this a lot but are still working on things. This is the most obvious issue I can see which may cause issues. But could this really reduce sessions dramatically? I didn't think load speed affected search engine ranking? I didn't think it'd affect sessions as visitors would have to access the website to realise it's too slow and leave?

Thanks for your questions,

Michael

[iugac]

Hello Michael,

what you are asking for is a difficult SEO audit comparing your old webpage with the new one. I will try to help out with some questions/advice, but it might be a little to late/expensive to conduct this audit if you didn't monitor the old version of the page.

1. I understand that Search Console or Moz were not used. Did you use any keyword tracking software to monitor your positions? Do you know what specific keywords you were ranking for? Do you know what specific keywords you are not ranking for anymore?

2. Did you conduct a keyword research process in which you identified the size of your market and on the basis of which you restructured your metadata on the new website? From what I see you changes the titles and descriptions and so on. Were the changes made because some data you gathered or just because you wanted to change them?

3. As you said, redirects are very important on deploying a new website. Did you have a list with all previous links (internal and external) and 301 them?

4. Loading time is also very important. Make sure you optimize your website for speed. Use Google Page Speed and you should be fine. Did you also change servers or the server location while deploying the new website?

I could write many other points. The idea is that your questions requires a lot of work to be answered. If you have more focused questions, I would be happy to help you out. However, I think you have a lot of work to do and I am not sure that analyzing through archive.org is your best solution. I would conduct a keyword research process and after that I would focus on all on-page relevant aspects of your website. After that, I would focus on the external ones (authority, links and other).

Regards, Cristian