SIte Redesign - Disaster for Organic Traffic

[AlightAnalytics]

A client just redesigned their site and launched it around May 30.  The organic traffic has had a MAJOR drop and has not returned yet.  All of the old pages have been 301 redirected to the new pages.  Any thoughts on what could be causing this to www.brickhousesecurity.com?

In Google Webmaster Tools, before the redesign we were receiving about 300,000 impressions and 10-12,000 clicks.  Now the impressions are only 100,000 with half as many clicks.

Thanks!

[imageworks-261290]

i dunno how it is for everyone else, but the site was really slow to me. Try using different image formats instead of png's. maybe try jpg's?

we had this as a problem, made a few changes, and our site speed went up instantaneously

other thing is make sure your CSS and javascript are in external files when can be, although its usually the images and other media that are playing the major role in site speed

[EGOL]

Here is the key for diagnosing a problem like this.

Do this assessment.....

1. where traffic was coming from before the drop

2. where traffic is coming from now

3. use 1 and 2 to determine what traffic you lost

4. go to those SERPs to see what happened

5. look at your pages to determine the cause

(If you don't have old analytics see if you can get raw logs off of server and look at them with a tool like weblogexpert - free low feature version if you don't want to pay)

The above will tell you if you had a traffic loss.  However, your post complains about an impression loss.  That is very different.  For that use weblogexpert to determine if your problem is really an engagement loss rather than a traffic loss.  If that is the case then the new design fails to connect visitors to content as well as the original design.  To solve that you need better site navigation and cues that lead to deeper content.

[CleverPhD]

You can use the analytics to tell where the traffic drops are coming from but I think that you need to get to why Google or some other search engine traffic is dropping.  So I totally agree with what EGOL mentions, but I think you already have a global grasp that traffic has dropped.  Here are what I would suggest are next steps to then fix the issues of why the traffic has dropped.

Odds are is that technically you may have a problem going on.

Go through your GWT reports for crawl errors and HTML optimization etc.  We relaunched and it gave us all kinds of clues on what to fix.

You need to double check all of your 301 paths - I bet that there are some holes.  This is down and dirty detail work.   I bet that they are probably not as correct as you think.  Don't assume that if you test a few the rest are ok.  Dont assume that the developer says that they are working that they are working.  Run them through a tool to make sure that you are sending a 301 response.  I had a site that was using 302 responses vs 301 (a temporary vs a permanent redirect).  Verify, verify, verify.

Did you change title tags on your pages.  Titles are a big signal and if you change them, you can see a drop.  You can look at your traffic and ranking analysis to look at sample pages.  If you did do a radical change, you may want to go back to your original title tag methods.

Run site speed tools

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights#url=www.brickhousesecurity.com&mobile=false

See if your speed has dropped.  The GWT will also show over time if your site is speeding up or slowing down.  You may need to look at your server setup.

Verify the HTML

http://validator.w3.org/

Did you setup

It looks like you may have changed a bunch of things at once and so it is hard to tell what you changed so see what was impacted.  Usually in cases like this, Google is trying to figure out the changes and so it may take a while to sort out.  I just gave some examples, but you need to review everything that has changed and see what the differences are.   There are some things, even with a 301 redirects that are correct, if you changed the URL structure and title tags and the new site has HTML that does not validate, Google may take a while to sort it out.  I had a site that we did a complete overhaul and it was 6 months before the traffic came back and that was with pretty good controls in place.

Good luck!

[ThompsonPaul]

You'll also want to check whether you have fewer pages indexed now than before the redesign. if you have significantly fewer pages, you'll have lost a lot of long-tail search query traffic.

Check out what search terms brought traffic before, and to what page, compared to after the redesign as well.

Paul