Organic Brand Traffic Tanking

[Shorething]

Hey Guys,

We recently launched a new website in late February. Since then, we have seen a drop in organic traffic from most of our top organic keywords. My major concern is the drop that we've seen from our branded keywords. Since the new site launch, our #1 organic traffic and revenue-driving keyword (brand name) dropped over 31%! It should be noted that all of our URLs changed, however, I've updated the sitemap in GWT and we have utilized 301 redirects on all old URLs. Any insights or recommendations on where I should be looking or what I should be doing?

Thanks!

[SEOAndy]

can you provide us with a url, it would be useful in this case.

Something to note would be what I consider as the "bedding down" period of a new site, whether 100% new or just a website refresh or a wholesale a website was here and now here is a different one. It refers to the 1 or 2 months following go live (it is similar tto the sandbox theory) where Google doesn't totally know whether to trust a site or not and nor has it indexed every new url yet.

You've done all the right things, you just need to wait and check next month - results won't be instant with this kind of thing ... remember SEO is a Journey and Not a Destination.

[seopeers]

I would also dig into your analytics under content. Start comparing pages viewed so you can start pin-pointing what pages are dropping out of the SERPs in-case you missed any in your 301s. I recently had a situation where I did everything right but the site I was working on had an internal search that was indexable so after looking through my analytics I was able to find out where my drop in traffic was really coming from.

Like Andy said, it's still a bit soon, so give it some time and continually check up on it.

[Shorething]

Thanks Andy, what you said makes sense. It's just alarming when we are so used to having a certain traffic/revenue level and it just drops off the face of the earth. I'm sure there is some kind of period in which Google does not know whether or not to trust the new website, so I'm keeping a close eye on it. Unfortunately, I don't deal with new websites frequently, so I don't have much to go off of.

[Shorething]

Thanks Brandon! Like you, our old site had indexable internal search pages, which we have excluded from being indexed on the new site - which could be having an impact. I've looked at GA to compare new URLs with the old ones, but unfortunately I am seeing drop offs across ALL pages

[seopeers]

Yes I saw the same thing. I than took the site and implemented a similar search like the old site so that I could get the pages back and internal linking the site had back in place. This seemed to help my traffic and rankings move back into place.

[Shorething]

Update

Hey guys. I have noticed that there was a sharp increase in direct traffic that coincided with the sharp decrease in organic traffic. Could the 301s somehow be stripping the referrer URL making search traffic look like direct (seems far fetched, but wanted to throw it out there)? Any experience with this?

[seopeers]

I'm pretty sure that if it's a 301 permanent server-side redirect, than it will be seen in analytics as direct traffic. However in the past I've seen a lot of talk about Google seeing the original source of traffic in the first place with the 301 being hidden, but I've had experiences like your talking about and I do believe it's direct. Would love to hear some other SEO brains on this lol.

[mikecp]

301s will preserve the referral data, so it should not be the case that it's being stripped out.

[seopeers]

Good to hear Distilled on this one Thanks Mike!