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
-
Building a new page: What on-page SEO would you build in?
Hi all, Building a new page for a fairly competitive keyword. Need to make sure the on-page SEO is pretty top notch, because link building (including internal links) will be difficult. I've optimised the meta description, the alt tags and image names, and included the keyword in the Title Tags. Not a great deal I can do with regards to optimising for mobile or considering migrating to the AMP project because this is handled externally. What else would you suggest? Cheers in advance, Rhys
On-Page Optimization | | SwanseaMedicine1 -
2 Similar Pages
Hello, I have two very similar pages. The first page is an apartment rental page with a map, rental listings and some neighborhood data below. The neighborhood data includes useful info about the area with photos, text about the area, crime rates, avg. rental rates, etc. The second page is a neighbourhood guide that includes virtually the same data as the rental page, but in longer form ie. more photos, more text, etc. I want the rental page to rank, while ranking the neighborhood page is not important as it would be used more for link bait. But since the information on the two pages is the same, I don't want them to compete with each other. I'm thinking of putting a cannonical tag on the neighborhood page pointing back to the rental page. Is that the correct thing to do in this instance? Thanks for your help. J
On-Page Optimization | | torontojon0 -
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 on page links
Hello, I have a page that isn't ranking very well. http://nicontrols.com/uk/drives-motors/variable-speed-drives According to the MOZ research tools I have too many on page links. I believe most of these are a result of the advanced filtration options on the left hand side of the page. I don't want to remove the filters as they are extremely useful for customers but I am also worried about the number of links Anyone get any ideas about the number of links? Should I care?
On-Page Optimization | | DavidLenehan0 -
What to do with pre-panda gateway pages?
We used an SEO firm back in the day to create gateway landing pages for our site heavily optimized for certain keywords and phrases. They ranked well for years and then the panda/penguin updates hit and the pages no longer rank at all. The content on the pages is actually useful and decent (http://payloadz.com/info-sell-ebooks.asp). The html is over-optimized on keyword though. What should be our strategy here? The keywords and phrases are still important for us. Should we move the content to another URL with less HTML optimization, remove the existing optimization on the pages where they are? The backlinks are of poor quality as well. We have gone through a disavow process and still no affect on these pages after a month.
On-Page Optimization | | Shannon-PayLoadz0 -
Would I be safe canonicalizing comments pages on the first page?
We are building comment pages for an article site that live on a separate URL from the article (I know this is not ideal, but it is necessary). Each comments page will have a summary of the article at the top. Would I be safe using the first page of comments as the canonical URL for all subsequent comment pages? Or could I get away with using the actual article page as the canonical URL for all comment pages?
On-Page Optimization | | BostonWright0 -
Is there a SEO penalty for multi links on same page going to same destination page?
Hi, Just a quick note. I hope you are able to assist. To cut a long story short, on the page below http://www.bookbluemountains.com.au/ -> Features Specials & Packages (middle column) we have 3 links per special going to the same page.
On-Page Optimization | | daveupton
1. Header is linked
2. Click on image link - currently with a no follow
3. 'More info' under the description paragraph is linked too - currently with a no follow Two arguments are as follows:
1. The reason we do not follow all 3 links is to reduce too many links which may appear spammy to Google. 2. Counter argument:
The point above has some validity, However, using no follow is basically telling the search engines that the webmaster “does not trust or doesn’t take responsibility” for what is behind the link, something you don’t want to do within your own website. There is no penalty as such for having too many links, the search engines will generally not worry after a certain number.. nothing that would concern this business though. I would suggest changing the no follow links a.s.a.p. Could you please advise thoughts. Many thanks Dave Upton [long signature removed by staff]0 -
Duplicate content on video pages
Hi guys, We have a video section on our site containing about 50 videos, grouped by category/difficulty. On each video page except for the embedded player, a sentence or two describing the video and a list of related video links, there's pretty much nothing else. All of those appear as duplicate content by category. What should we do here? How long a description should be for those pages to appear unique for crawlers? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | lgrozeva0