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
-
301 Redirect or landing page
Hi everyone. I'm currently doing some SEO for a client, at the moment he has some landing pages which are categorised, but the category is set as a 302 redirect. I have a dilemma whether to 301 redirect to the landing page or make a page for each category. The link structure is as follows - http://examplesite.co.uk/products/fire/company-1/product/ so currently this is set as a 302 redirect - http://examplesite.co.uk/products/fire/company-1/ Do I make this page a category page and link the page to the children with some on-page optimisation or 301 redirect it?
On-Page Optimization | | Unbranded_Lee0 -
Renamed a page and created a 301, page lost its rankings.
We changed a page name to fall under the root of our site from domain.com/page1/page301d/ to domain.com/page301d/ and after 2 weeks it still is not back to its #3 position. Now it is on the bottom of page 3. I cant figure out what im doing wrong here. The original .com/page1/ that this page fell under was removed totally and redirected to antoher page that was more relevant. I went ahead and re-enabled this page and its contnent, because the page was linking out to the page we 301d. This page we re-enabled had about 150 links poitning to it and therefore i was thinking that maybe the link juice from this page (or relevancy) via an internal link was helping it rank. This was updated about 6 days ago and the internal link is back Any other ideas why this might not be working. Ive checked all the 301s, content has not changed on the page. We have updated the strcuture for many pages. Instead of having the pages in question fall under anotehr page, they all fall under the root and its sub content is now only 2 levels deep , instead of being 3. hope that makese sense.
On-Page Optimization | | waqid0 -
Duplicate Pages software
Hey guys, i was told few hours ago about a system that can take few of your keywords and automatically will create new links and pages (in the map file) for your website, so a website that was build with 20 pages( for example) will be shown to SE as a site with hundreds of pages, thing that should help the SEO IS anyone heard about such a software? is it legal? any advice that you can give on this mater? Thanks i.
On-Page Optimization | | iivgi0 -
"City page" links in footer of home page: Spammy?
Is listing a bunch of links to city pages in the footer of a home page considered "spammy" to Google? (ie- Chicago Alarms, Illinois Alarms, Naperville Alarms, etc.) What are the negative affects this might have on ranking, if any?
On-Page Optimization | | MChi0 -
Several Links in Some Pages
Dear all, Our main site is a bussiness directory, and following some SEO advices, we are creating landing pages for each category, in order to optimize them for the keywords. Those landing pages have links to the listings related to them. Using the same idea, we have created pages related to the regions, and those pages include links to the listings located in them. The only problem that I see with that, is the number of links that some categories or regions could have. Is there a limit of recomended number of links per page, from a SEO perspective? We also have a main category page, that includes a list of all categories, and this page could also have a relatively high number of links. The pages have around 300 to 500 words, some include also images, some include videos. Many thanks for your help, Daniel
On-Page Optimization | | te_c0 -
Editing Author Pages
Hi, Quick question regarding author pages. I have the blog set as me for my author page. so the url is: mysite.com/blog/author/miles/ Now, seomoz has picked up that my author page is missing meta description. But, this cannot be editied through wordpress as there is no edit option available. I may really be missing something, but where can I alter the author page, I have a feeling it might be fed from G+ but no really sure what part of G+ is used as the description. Thanks Miles
On-Page Optimization | | easyrider20 -
Home Page Content - In a Div?
Is putting content in a div so it doesn't muck up the look of the home page create a problem in doing well organically? Example - http://www.callawaygardens.com. We have lots of clients that want no text on the home page and we are trying to figure out how to do this while still ranking well organically. What are your thoughts? Can we get in trouble? Are there negative impacts with SEO doing it like this? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | RezStream80 -
Https and secure pages
Hello, I have a facebook badge in my footer. Is it okay if I make the code call on https. It makes the page secure for IE. I have also have done this for images. These secure urls are also being called on non secure pages. But I don't think that matters does it? Code below. Thanks Tyler
On-Page Optimization | | tylerfraser0