Massive drop in sales - how do I find out why?
-
I am working with my client managing/maintaining their online store.We have been making big improvements to onsite SEO, improved URL structures (complete with re-directs) etc, we use Yoast Premium to optimise pages for search and Yoast Local.
We have a bounce rate of around 20%, however, suddenly in mid August, our revenues virtually vanished overnight. Moz is reporting a search visibility drop of 51%, while visitor levels remain fairly average, certainly no drops that can be compared with the sudden loss of conversions.
I am at a loss and cannot fathom why our sales have dropped.
Can anyone suggest where I might look?
Many thanks
Bob
-
Further to the above, I think I've solved that issue. There was an error on that product you used as your example, it was loading an attribute as a variation that didn't exist.
I've removed it now.
-
Hi Vijay, this is really helpful.
We recently changed the product options framework for the website, and I know the previous options solution had a pop up warning for the completion of the prescriptions fields.
We are now however using a completely different solution for the prescription form, and it's possible that there is some code left over from our previous solution.
I am no longer using the developer who created the previous options framework, so can you tell me if there is a way we can track down where this code is?
For our current options, this is all handled by Gravity Forms in WordPress, so I don't think that will be causing the problem.
Thanks again for your helpful suggestion.
Bob
-
Hi Bob,
Although people are blaming it some Algo update for the drop, yet I would like to keep my focus on conversion rate drop ( if you framed you question correctly, that there is not much drop in visitors compared to sales).
I tried using your website to find anything that was amiss and the only fault I could find which can directly correlate to sales is that Javascript alerts for order validation, If this dialogue is suppressed, validation fails and order can't be processed.
https://postimg.org/image/6axhg8yw5/
Please look into it.
Regards,
Vijay
-
Hi,
I agree with Blue Corona, As there was a algo update few weeks ago, if you check your Google consol you would be able to see.
in my opinion, you need to cosinder update in order to determin the fall. -
Yes, this is an ongoing issue, my client manages their own inventory so they often make changes without me knowing to stock levels/availability.
-
Completely understand the problem!
Another thing I would look at is this: https://i.gyazo.com/f00555df1f7dcc374785d29c8ed4d9cb.png
You can see on that page there are three out of stock products. I would (if you can) push these down the results. As in the top 6 (above the fold) I can see one out of stock. You're missing an opportuntity here to sell that product.
-
Hey Thomas,
Thanks for your feedback. This is a planned update actually. We have a unique requirement where our products require a lot of options to be provided as you have seen. Unfortunately, due to the way the product page is constructed in the theme we are using, it puts those options prior to the checkout button in an area that should only take up the header.
I am about to update the theme to a major update released last week. Once that is done we are going to have a custom product page template created to put everything back in the right place Currently, because of the options placement, if we activate the tabs section, they appear at the foot of the page!
Complete nightmare!
-
Had a quick look through your shop, found this page: https://www.glassesonspec.co.uk/cheap-prescription-sunglasses/mens-sunglasses/wayfarer-style-cd1038/
I would look into the styling of your page, it's not utilising the width as well as I would think you could. I would personally make the content below the list "included with every pair" use the full width (image/description)
-
I use a spreadsheet to track my top 10 competitors, every time the new DA index is released. By watching our competitors, I can see trends and seasons in our markets and how algorithm changes affect us and them. Most of the time, the majority of us see the same increases and reductions. This is not an immediate answer bc it takes a long time to populate enough data to begin measuring, but after a while, it very valuable when the owner comes knocking.
KJr
-
Thanks Patrick, that's really useful info. I'll try some of these suggestions
-
Hi there
I would make sure that you properly 301 redirected all old URLs to new URLs. If you are not, Google could be having a hard time understanding you moved your URLs. I would then check your robots.txt and meta tags to make sure you aren't accidentally blocking your site from search engines.
Take a look at your competitor with competitor research. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What are they doing that I am not?
- What changes have they made that I haven't?
- Are they leveraging Schema?
- What kind of content are they developing?
- What links do they have?
After that, I would also make sure your eCommerce tracking is properly tracking, sometime this can get wonky, especially with URLs changing. Please review this, especially Enhanced eCommerce.
Lastly, one of my favorite resources for this comes from InFlow with their Rankings and Traffic Drop Checklist. It's packed with tips and places to look.
Start there and see what happens! Let me know if you need more help! Good luck!
P -
Hi Vijay,
No significant changes were made in the period that we feel would have the impact that we have seen.
The website/checkout experience tests fine, we are still receiving a trickle of orders, but not the volume we were enjoying before.
Please see my response to the above reply, it appears we are not the only player in our sector who has seen a drop, several competitors have seen a similar drop in search visibility too.
The website is www.glassesonspec.co.uk.
If there is any other specific information you think would be useful, then do please let me know.
Many thanks
-
hi Bob,
You have not provided enough information or website URL for anyone to answer accurately, anything we reply here would be mere speculation.
Please provide more details about the website and when exactly was done prior to sales drop.
That's the reason, we have culturally created an environment within our organization to LOG everything we do on our client sites.
Regards,
Vijay
-
Hi,
Thanks for your quick response, interestingly, our main competitor saw a 15% search visibility rise, and a few other competitors like us saw a large fall. Does this lend weight to your theory that perhaps it's external factors and the biggest competitor raising their game?
-
Hmm, that is very odd and I'm sure extremely frustrating.
I would use Google Search Console to look at the pages seeing the biggest decrease and see if your ranked position has drastically changed. I would assume either you were hit with an algorithm update or competitors have really upped their efforts which would have impacted your rankings.
Sorry I don't have a more definitive answer, but I hope that helps!
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
-
Hi My website is showing 403 error. Please help me to find out the reason
Hi My website is showing 403 error. Please help me to find out the reason & how to fix URL :http://eosdev.sharjah.ae/admin/adminlogin.aspx
Technical SEO | | nlogix0 -
Location-Aware Browsing issue. Could it cause a drop in rankings
Hello Mozzers. A client has seen big drop in their organic rankings in google.co.uk. Desktop results have dropped from page one to page three and mobile results have completely gone. They have recently added Location-Aware Browsing to the site so that it attempts to find you location and add this to the search box. However this appears to be in a loop and doesn't then turn off once you have allowed it. It keeps appearing in both Firefox and Chrome and asking for permission to use you location. Could this have resulted in the ranking drop? There have also rolled out a new mobile version and this has the same issue. Any ideas? Thanks in advance TH
Technical SEO | | highwayfive0 -
June 7th, 2013 Structured Data Drop
On June 7th, 2013 our structured data (as reported in GWT) dropped from ~61M items on ~7M pages to ~13.5M items on ~1.5M pages. Since that time those numbers have continued to fall. We made no code changes during this time. I've searched around the web and found a few people pointing to a similar June 7th, 2013 drop in reported structured data. Can anyone offer any insight beyond speculation? Outside of the June 7th date, what can cause such a dramatic drop in structured data? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | RyanOD0 -
Why has my keyword dropped and risen so much in only 7 days?
Sorry if this question is really obvious (or unanswerable) but my client asked me for an explanation and as a relative SEO 'noob' I couldn't really answer them. The client's site http://www.solentlep.org.uk/ dropped 29 places for the keyword LEP last week (all the other keywords had small rises and falls) and then this week has jumped back up the same 29 places. I made no changes to the site in the 7 period (as I hadn't worked out what to change) and although everything is fine now I'd still like to let the client know what caused the blip, or is it one of those things that 'nobody knows'.
Technical SEO | | bendyman0 -
How do find where a 301 redirect is located
My report says I have http://www.30minuteseder.com/Passover.blog redirected to http://30minuteseder.com/Passover.blog. It is correct, but I can't find where the 301 redirect is located. I looked in my .htaccess file in the root and it's not there. How do I find it so I can change it?
Technical SEO | | Sederman0 -
Google rankings dropped dramatically after 24 hrs of hosting suspension
Hi, One of my websites ( http://www.traveldestinationsearch.com/ ) dropped most of its Google rankings after 24 hours of hosting suspension (from April 26 until April 27, 2012). The hosting company suspended my website after exceeding the bandwidth limit: there was no unusual activity on my website, it just exceeded its bandwidth limit by 20-30MB for the previous month. Anyway, the website is back online since April 27 but the problem is that, following these 24 hrs of no service, I see a dramatic decrease of my website's Google rankings for its main keywords. Even today, April 29, I can't find my website anywhere in the first 100 results for most of its targeted keywords. Before the suspension, the website ranked #1 for its main keyword and somewhere in the first 2-3 pages of Google search results for other two main keywords. My question is: is it the hosting suspension the reason for the Google ranking drop, and (assuming this is a temporary problem) when do you think I should expect my website to regain the rankings it had before the hosting suspension? Thanks for your support. Regards, Adrian
Technical SEO | | AdrianBanu0 -
Drop down navigation and link juice
Hi! We are desperately needing to overhaul our site navigation setup, and we have so many categories that we think our site could really benefit from a drop down navigation similar to what these sites have: http://www.paychex.com/ http://www.bmc.com/ We've held off doing this type of navigation in the past because we were only seeing people use flash to create it and we knew that it wouldn't be good for link juice. But these two sites are using HTML and CSS - which seems like a much better style and good for SEO. Do you agree? We want to make the switch but are worried about losing linking power by nesting our navigation in 's and CSS styling.
Technical SEO | | sciway0 -
If googlebot fetch doesnt find our site will it be indexed?
We have a problem with one of our sites (wordpress) not getting fetched by googlebot. Some folders on the url get found others not. So we have isolated it as a wordpress issue. Will this affect our page in google serps anytime soon? Does any whizz kid out there know how to begin fixing this as we have spent two days solid on this. url is www.holden-jones.co.uk Thanks in advance guys Rob
Technical SEO | | wonderwall0