Major drop in visitor numbers?

[AllieMc]

Hi I have been working on the following site www.espares.co.nz - it is a parts location service .  We have just done a massive redesign and addressed some major issues with duplicate content - which is a work in progress.  What I am wondering is have we overlooked something as there has been a sudden drop off on the site visitors  since 25 September with a drop of nearly 30% of organic search visits?  Would appreciate feedback.

[danatanseo]

My first inclination is to say "be patient" and ride out the dip. I have never seen a complete site overhaul that didn't experience a dip in traffic. Next, I would say "Are your ducks in a row?"

What I mean by that is:

1. Have you set up appropriate 301 redirects if any of your URLs were re-written?
2. Are those 301 working properly (did you test them)?
3. If no 301 redirects, did you implement canonical tags?
4. Are you actively monitoring Google Webmaster Tools? Are you acting on those reports?
5. Have you created and resubmitted a new sitemap to Google?
6. Did you reinstall analytics or are you using different analytics? It could be that your analytics have changed more than your traffic (This is a big one....really consider this carefully).

If the answer is yes to all of the above. Be patient. I know it's hard, but don't freak out and sit tight. You should be fine after a little time.

Dana

[AllieMc]

Hi Dana,

We thought it was our analytics configuration however we did the SEOMoz crawl and that highlighted the same issues.  Thanks for the other comments though it is worth checking those basics too.

[Personnel_Concept]

i checked your domain authority which is very less. you might have to do make some quality links to our site again to get back the trust of Google and increase domain authority.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Dana is correct - you need to ride the wave a little while Google looks at all of the changes and then recalculates where you should be.

Something else, how have you been dealing with the duplicated content? If a change in content on landing pages has happened, it could be worth using CrazyEgg and looking at a heatmap of those pages to see where people are the most active. Can be a real eye-opener!

Really need to know more about how the changes were made before we can look at other possible reasons.

Andy