Site Doing Horrible After Redesign
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Yes, we were. Page 1, between position 3 and 7 on our main niche keywords.
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Our developer and SEO are different folks and my relationship with each of them is completely independent from the other. Great question though.
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Interesting. So you were ranking well on a hosted platform.
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You are absolutely correct. A different platform, but a hosted one nonetheless.
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You can see why I'm so confused!
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You may be in need of a second opinion.
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Dennis is giving you a good one and I can make a recommendation for your SEO services if you wanna pm me.
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It was supposed to be every page and I was charged $600+ just for the redirecting part of the process separate and part from the design.
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Curious why you didn't keep your current Volusion URLs? With BigCommerce (which we are a partner), you can match the Volusion URL and forego the 301 redirect if you feel that's critical to your SEO success. A proper 301 redirect should be adequate and not account for such a dramatic drop of traffic.
As an ecommerce consultant you need to understand where your traffic was coming from and make sure that's protected when you move. For example, if your products have a lot of Facebook Likes, when you change the URL, you will lose 100% of those Likes...and this should be a factor in choosing a new platform.
You should be able to diagnose what's happening from your Google Analytics. Take a look at where traffic has dropped. What landing pages were driving traffic before and no longer are? What keywords have disappeared and what pages were appearing for those keywords? Are those pages 301'd correctly? What products and categories were driving your traffic and revenue?
Obviously check all your pages for proper meta tags (INDEX, FOLLOW)...with these "simple" platforms, it is easy to accidentally make your whole store disappear.
It sounds to me like something was missed during the migration and you're now. We are a top Volusion consulting firm and have worked on hundreds of stores...and we're partners of both BigCommerce and 3dcart. You can have a successful store on a hosted platform. Having PHP access is not critical to your success. Yes, it can help but you migrated from Volusion which has much more restrictions than BigCommerce (in terms of what you can accomplish from a template perspective and SEO)...so I feel we're missing something here.
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Thank you Erik for the reply. I switched the URLs based on the recommendation that the BC URLs were much more user friendly. For example www.website.com/myproduct/ was better than www.website.com/category1_myproduct/269.html.
I feel we're missing something too!
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www.website.com/category1_myproduct/269.html could be more powerful than www.website.com/myproduct/ but it could also be weaker. You've added in the category name which may be redundant (I'm not sure without more information) and you've weakened the power of "myproduct" brought to your SEO. Plus, you have now removed the 269 which for most people is the manufacturer's SKU or UPC code which many people search.
If a lot of your traffic was SKU-related (which you can easily find in your analytics), then you definitely took a step backwards instead of forwards.
Yes, BC gives you much greater flexibility and power with your URLs, but you need to carefully evaluate how to use that power and really understand your current traffic and its origins.
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Thank you Erik, I understand what you are saying. These are things I did not know which is why I had hired the company to handle the migration. They came highly recommended from BC and I trusted that they would do this stuff all the time. I make equipment for dogs, which I am good at. I know that I know nothing about full website migrations, but I believed a trusted BC partner would.
The 269 in my example was the Volusion category ID, not the SKU.
Identifying these things in Analytics is not what I would call easy for me. I can tell I am going to have to learn a lot more about this subject if I want to understand things which is why I joined this community. The first order of business is to get our site back where it was. Does it sound to you like it can be addressed on the current platform?
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In my opinion, no. Moving to another platform puts you another iteration away from the original solution. If you do move and things don't get better then what? You'll have double the 301's to address.
My recommendation would be to restore your store back to Volusion to verify your conclusions but I suspect you 1) did not make a full backup of your store's data and data files; and 2) you did not keep your Volusion store active (no-indexed and not attached to your domain) until you were sure everything was in proper order.
Don't forget that the Volusion Product Name Short field serves two purposes: one, as the URL and two, as the anchor text on your category pages (which directly affects your internal link structure). It could be due to your breadcrumbs as Volusion takes the primary category of your site and uses it as the breadcrumb. I'm not sure how that got transferred over either.
I think your BC store is salvageable but not without fully investigating the issues via your store and your analytics...as well as your back link profile. For all we know it could simply be the latest Google updates.
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You're correct Erik. The only backup I did of my Volusion site was the customers, products and sale reports. My Volusion account was closed on 6/15 so that restore is not an option.
I also understand what you're saying about yet another move and the issues that could come with that. You've given me a lot to think about here. Thank you.
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Reach out to Volusion...I suspect they'll have all that data since it has only been 10 days. It will cost you but at least you could prove your theory.
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I will try that. Thank you Erik for your input.
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