We redesigned our website, make it responsive and page views tanked. What happened?
-
Last year, we redesigned our site and made it responsive. Our page views only grew by only 3% (the previous year they grew by 40%). If we exclude homepage views from our calculations, we get a drastically different picture-- and see over 30% growth for both total and unique pageviews. Any thoughts?
-
The first thing I think of is that you're measuring pageviews instead of sessions. If you put a lot of effort into streamlining the user experience, wouldn't you expect a decrease in pageviews as users are finding what they need faster?
I would check a few different things to gain a more complete picture. First, check your sessions instead of pageviews. If sessions are trending the way you expect them to compared to the previous year, then maybe the redesign impacted user behavior so they're hitting less pages on the site.
Next I'd see if there was any differentiation between mobile, tablet, and desktop pageviews that are skewing the data. Since the site is now responsive I wouldn't be surprised to see a difference in user behavior on mobile devices, and that may be impacting your pageviews.
Lastly, why not segment and compare by traffic source? If you can identify a sharp drop from a particular source you might be able to gain some insight there. An easy method of viewing this is to create a collection of pie charts or bar graphs so anyone can quickly see where the change was.
There are other ways you can slice and dice and segment your data to tell your story, but I would start there.
-
Yes, if we remove the homepage, the other pages are doing quite well (and increase of 30%). What would branded searches/visits show? I don't think we are quite big enough.....
-
One outstanding question for me is if you see fewer pages/visit when someone lands on your homepage than when they land on a deeper page? Is your brand big enough to be able to track branded searches/visits?
-
Hi John, Yes, we redesigned homepage (it used to be a fixed width with a carousel). Now it's a full width hero scrolling page. We have increased our social media sources but those links mostly led to internal pages (we rarely lead people to the homepage). I'd try and dig more into the referral sources.....
-
Hi Anna!
Did you do any other site architecture or design changes to your homepage? Sounds like overall your site is performing better (though not as quickly as the year before) with the changes but your homepage had something changed that would have affected this.
That, or if they are unique visitors then you may have lost some key rankings or a key traffic referral source. Or, quite simply, this isn't connected with the redesign and your marketing was less effective in the past year possibly because your resources internally were going towards the redesign.
Have you dug deeper into different traffic and referral sources to see if this could have led to it?
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
-
Duplicate Content Home Page http Status Code Query
Hi All, We have just redone a site wide url migration (from old url structure to new url structure) and set up our 301's etc but have this one issue whereby I don't know if' it's a problem of not. We have 1 url - www.Domain.co.uk**/** which has been set up to 301 redirect back to www.domain.co.uk However, when I check the server response code, it comes back as 200. So although it appears to visually 301 redirect if I put the url in the tool bar, the status code says different. Could this be seen as a potential duplicate home page potentially and if so , any idea how I could get around it if we can't solve the root cause of it. This is on a cake php framework, thanks PEte
Web Design | | PeteC120 -
Duplicate items across different pages?
On our new website we have a testimonials page which you can cycle through them. We also have the testimonial on the our work / project page. Essentially this is duplicate content from another page, what's the best thing to do here? In the sake of SEO, remove the duplicate content and only have one? Or won't it make much difference?
Web Design | | vortexuk0 -
Duplicate content on websites for multiple countries
I have a client who has a website for their U.S. based customers. They are currently adding a Canadian dealer and would like a second website with much of the same info as their current website, but with Canadian contact info etc. What is the best way to do this without creating duplicate content that will get us penalized? If we create a website at ABCcompany.com and ABCCompany.ca or something like that, will that get us around the duplicate content penalty?
Web Design | | InvoqMarketing0 -
How to submit or build website like this?
Hello Experts, how to submit website like this flow, i mean how can we show our home, about us, services and contact us page like this in search engine 14dcx86.png
Web Design | | JulieWhite0 -
Adding breadcrumbs in the body of a page
We want to implement breadcrumbs to improve the usability of our website - if we manually input breadcrumbs into the body of every page via our CMS are there any negative effects?
Web Design | | braunna0 -
I am looking to improve my on page seo, can you provide any recommendations or suggestions for how?
I am relatively new to the world of SEO and recently built a new site. I have read as many books as I can to help increase my skill set rapidly, and have attempted to implement the best of what I have learned but I know many of you have been in this arena for a while and I would be extremely appreciative of any suggestions you can offer with regard to on page. Thanks in advance. http://luxuryhomehunt.com - home page http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/orlando.html - city level http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/orlando/bay-hill.html - community level
Web Design | | Jdubin0 -
Landing pages vs internal pages.
Hey everyone I have run into a problem and would greatly appreciate anyone that could weigh in on it. I have a web client that went to an outside vendor for marketing. The client asked me to help them target some keywords and since I am new to the SEO world I have proceeded by researching the best keywords for the client. I found 6 that see excellent monthly searches. I then registered the .com and or .net domain names that match these words. I then started building landing pages that make reference to the keyword and then have links to his site to get more info. My customer sent the first of these sites to the marketer and he says I am doing things all wrong. He says rather then having landing pages like this I should just point the domain names at internal pages to the website. He also says that I should not have different looks for the landing pages from the main site and that I should have the full site menu on each landing page. I wanted to here what everyone here has to say about the pros and cons of the way to do this cause the guy giving the advice to me has a lower ranking site then I do and I have only started working on getting my site ranked this year. He has atleast according to him been doing this forever. Thanks, Ron
Web Design | | bsofttech0 -
Auto-Generated META tag on 404 Page
I'm currently creating a 404 error page for my site and I noticed that a similar site uses some sort of code to automatically generate a meta title. Is this useful? For instance type in electrolux.com/john This page does not exist but in the title you'll see John | Electrolux How can i do this on my site?
Web Design | | evacuumstoreSEO0