Why have we taken such a hit on page visitors?

[chrissmithps]

One of our customers owns a stationary company, URL (http://www.costcuttersuk.com) which targets schools and education. In September my company launched a new website for our client with an external company providing SEO.

Since the switch the customers feels they have completely dropped from the rankings and from looking at the Google Analytics reports it has become apparent that they have taken a huge hit on the amount of traffic coming into the site, almost 500 fewer visitors per day.

What is interesting is that the average time spent on the website has increased as is the same with the bounce rate yet everything else has taken a drop.

The platform it has been built on is Opencart , The only thing I can thing that is causing the issue’s is the page load times. They are 62% slower on the home page would this have such a huge impact?

I look forward to hearing your feedback.

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[Hutch42]

Increasing your load time by more than half will definitely have an effect on your rankings.

Instead of looking at traffic, why not look at conversions. There are ways of spoofing traffic that is no good, who cares if they lost 500 visits per day if none of those visits were buying their product or partaking in other conversion (email sign up, content interactions). I would look deeper into the traffic that is lost, see where it was coming from and what it was doing on the site to see if you lost useful traffic or not.

[PeaSoupDigital]

Your page has thousands of 301 redirects - this could be slowing it down and affecting ranking.

[LauraSultan]

Given what you've told us, there are any number of reasons why you have seen a dip in traffic. In addition to the load time (which would definitely have an impact, as Hutch says), I would check the following:

• Did you set up 301-redirects properly when you launched the new site?
• Did the internal link architecture change in any way with the redesign?
• What has the external SEO company done?
• When did traffic start to decline? Sharp decline? Gradual decline?
• Are there new competitors pushing the site down in the SERPs?
• Does the dip in traffic correspond to any algorithm updates? (Check the Panguin Tool.)

[chrissmithps]

Thanks for the feedback Laura, Our developer implemented the 301 redirects however I have been informed theres around 6000, 301 redirects in place on the website. My next question is would be are 301 redirects permanent?  I assume once Google has indexed the new pages I can remove the redirects I am right in thinking this? If i am what is the time period that you remove the redirects.

I don't have a great understanding of what the other SEO company has carried out other than clearing any 404 errors, suggesting Meta Titles and descriptions for certain pages and suggesting our client add's new content.

The traffic was on a small decline before the new website went live, but it seem's to have carried on decreasing rather than increasing and companies that haven't been established for half as long with a much lower page rank and authority are appearing higher on the SERP's. Which is really frustrating.

I'll check out the Panguin tool.

Thanks again for your response.

[chrissmithps]

Cheers Hutch, I will have a look into that.

[LauraSultan]

Yes, that's a lot of redirects. However, I wouldn't advise removing them just because Google has updated their index. You may still have a lot of backlinks pointing to the old URLs. If you remove the redirects, they'll be broken links.

Is it possible to use wildcards to cut down on the number of redirects?