New e-commerce launched, drop in traffic
-
One of our clients launched a new e-commerce site and there was a significant (60%) drop in traffic in Google Analytics following the launch. We are about 10 days into the new site, and our suspicion is that the move has caused a decrease in their site authority which has lowered their search position.
The old site had the store at sitename.com/store. The new site has a Shopify store at shop.sitename.com. There were very few external followed links to the store pages, so we thought that there would be little effect for overall site traffic by moving the store to a subdomain.
Any recommendations for next steps on diagnosing the problem and working towards a solution?
-
Hey,
It's easy peasy. Here is what u need to do:
1. confirm your site sitename.com/ with google webmaster tools.
2. check the craxl errors section after 3-5 days. you will find lots of 404 errors under the /store/ directory.
3. Make the right fixes to those 404 errors (most will have to be redirected 301 to the new location urls under the new subdomain shop.sitename.com ).
Let me know if you need more help here !
-
My first thought is that redirects were not done properly. Check the wayback machine or Google Cache and check some of the old links and see if they redirect. Also if there were any previous versions of the website (before the most recent,) then make sure those are redirected as well.
-
Hey Design Hammer!
IMO, this new site structure is the cause of what you are experiencing for SURE! Any way of reaching out to the sites that are linking to the old URL and have them update those links to the newly structured URL? This will help with the DA/PA drop and possibly help with the rankings.
Using OSE, I would run the site and go to the "Linking Domains" tab and start creating a list of the sites that are linking to the old url structure. Then reach out to them and ask if they will update. This would be my initial plan of action.
Hope this helps and BEST of luck on the recovery!
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
-
We have a client that wants to apply UTM URL tagging to track local organic traffic in Google Analytics. Is there any benefit in doing this?
One of our clients requested that we apply UTM URL tagging to better track organic traffic in Google Analytics. We found this to be an odd request because we are most familiar with UTM tracking for special campaigns (referral tracking, PPC, email tracking, etc). Is there any benefit of applying UTM tags to urls to analyze local organic traffic in Google Analytics? Are there any resources out there about this? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB0 -
How do I find out where my "direct traffic" came from?
Last weekend we had a significant rise in traffic to our site. Digging in to Google Analytics, most of it has come from the USA, with some from Canada, Australia and a few other countries. It has all gone to the same article on our website. I have also found that it has mostly come from Safari (in app), on an ipad and iphone. Google Analytics has put this down as Direct traffic. My feeling is that it is not. Could it be from a social media app - perhaps someone with many followers has pinned from our site, or something along these lines. Could it actually be organic search traffic and Google misattributing it as Direct? Bounce rate and time on site is fine, so I don't think it's a bot / spam.
Reporting & Analytics | | TheJewelleryEd
Any ideas / places I could go to help me find out would be appreciated, thank you. Joss0 -
Referral Traffic Issue
I'm working on a site that has low traffic volumes due to its niche. That's fine but we are daily getting referral traffic from unrelated domains without a link. These visits are always 100% bounce which is impacting the overall click.through rate. The domains are not the same and different ones come through all the time, so it is difficult to keep on top of. Any ideas what could be going on here and an effective way of dealing with this?
Reporting & Analytics | | MickEdwards0 -
Why is my traffic dropping so hard?
Hi guys, My traffic has been dropping pretty hard from just over 3k to around 250 in the last few days. I've ran a few tests using Google webmaster tools and Open Site Explorer, as well as answering a pretty cool quiz that was created by an SEO to determine if I'm the victim of any Google updates etc, and everything is looking okay... What do you think could be causing this issue? We're only just gearing up to start on a SEO campaign. At the moment no SEO is being done other than just casual blogging. CcZoXP7.png
Reporting & Analytics | | featherseo0 -
New GA interface - Number of conversion by source
Hi Guys, Hope this is an easy one for a GA ninja. In the new GA interface, how can I view the number of conversions by source, instead of the default conversion rate by source. For example, if I want to view the number of conversion from Adwords. I'm looking at Goals > Source / Medium > Google CPC and looking at Goal Set 1. However all data is expressed in percentages. Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | David_ODonnell0 -
A lot of traffic to one page from Google referral
We recently received a lot of traffic to one page from
Reporting & Analytics | | underthesun808
google.com referral. When I look in analytics it reports that the traffic is
coming from /url that’s not real helpful. Is there a way to get more specific
information as to what the referring url was?0 -
My website traffic drop two times
Hi all, on our website www.watchalyzer.com I have unique content that we are writing especially for this online magazine. In last two months our traffic dropped two times. First time on October 20th and after 20 days traffic got back on November 10th. Second time traffic dropped on November 15th and it is still down Does somebody have idea what could be reason for this and how it can be fixed? thanks, Nikola
Reporting & Analytics | | GearyLSF0 -
How much direct traffic is really direct?
Does anyone else think that a large chunk of traffic labelled as "Direct" in your analytics isn't direct at all. When you analyse traffic trends it seems that a large percentage could just be browsers with their referring URL hidden so it only appears direct. Here's the evidence: When we've been affected by major search algorithm changes, we've seen big changes in direct traffic as well as organic, but not in referral traffic. If direct traffic is just bookmarks, typed-in URLs, and people clicking through from emails why is direct traffic 85% new visitors? We don't do any offline advertising, so you'd expect genuine direct traffic to be returning visitors -- either our brand loyalists or subscribers to our email newsletters. If you segment direct traffic into new and returning visitors and look at a major algo update as discussed in 1), you find all the drop in direct traffic is from New Direct visitors, with no drop at all in Returning Direct visitors. Can anyone explain who these New, Direct visitors are if not simply mislabelled new, search visitors. Cookie deletion can't be the problem (ie: they can't be Returning, Direct really) because the traffic doesn't behave like returning, direct (that is, it varies too much). I'd be really interest to hear theories, and whether anyone has any figures on the extent of HTTP referrer blocking.
Reporting & Analytics | | Dennis-529610