Site Migration and Traffic Help!

shictins

Hi Moz,

I recently migrated my website with the help of an SEO company using 301 redirects. The reason for the move was to change our CMS from .aspx to Drupal/Wordpress. The homepage (www.shiftins.com) and the blog (www.shiftins.com/blog) were the only two pages that kept the same url. Everything else was redirected. It's been about two months since the redirects were completed and traffic has dropped off about 90%. I'm starting to worry that something was not done properly and my traffic may never return.

The process for the redirects seem correct when I checked the work the SEO company did. All pages were duplicated, redirected to individual pages, then the old pages were de-indexed. Are there any insights the community can provide? Please help!

BlueprintMarketing

Whenever your are Preparing for a Website Relaunch that involves change your URL structure abruptly you will have a dip however 90% seems extremely drastic

However this is very common in this photograph http://i.imgur.com/UtYUyCX.jpg

use this free tool from kapost to inventory your content https://app.kapost.com/auditor

I you not know what you did to prepare print for this side from 301 redirect which should be page for page using redirect match then slowly over time make sure everything is done properly http://i.imgur.com/lutF4aj.png

Read: https://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

I like to move slowly and I always use Deep Crawl screaming frog is great too but in my opinion the DeepCrawl is the way to go.

Because you mentioned WordPress and Drupal I would recommend reading these lunch checks prior to major modifications

remember Google is going to play it safe make sure you know why the traffic has disappeared. If you want I will write your site through one of my tools for you?

all the best,

Tom

sorry for all the references I can tell you that they have helped me a lot.

Preparing for a Website Relaunch

UtYUyCX.jpg lutF4aj.png qiJnzjv.png DQ6kd98.jpg Qv54hyL.png

shictins

Thomas,

Thank you for your time! I seriously appreciate it. I've taken a quick look at the resources you provided and will be digging deeper into them soon. While the current company I'm working with looks like they did everything right by my standards, I'm starting to become worried because of all the online articles stating that I shouldn't lose more than 40% of traffic and that I should only have been affected for 3-4 weeks.

The first image I've attached is the organic search traffic data from my GA account showing the huge drop in traffic over the last two months.

The second image I've attached is the WMT data showing the drop in overall impressions and clicks on October 18th.

The third image is where it gets weird. It shows that the average overall ranking position has actually decreased showing that I'm actually ranking higher but getting less impressions and less clicks.

I'm having a hard time identifying where the issue is coming from. I've kept a pretty good record of data but can't seem to pinpoint what exactly the issue is. Is there anything that you can think of that I should look into? I would also appreciate any analysis, insights, or analytic tools you can provide.

traffic_zpsevs8mdcb.jpg impressions_zps0s1igziy.jpg position_zpsh6ipsvpx.jpg

Martijn_Scheijbeler

Are the new pages being indexed?

DonnaDuncan

I noticed a few problems. They might not be the answer you're looking for, but they could be a start.

Do you have the same tracking code as before and on every page?
Looks like your XML sitemap is missing some entries. It lists only 95 pages (none of the blog pages).
None of the title tags on your blog are populated with unique entries.
This has more to do with after people visit the site, but I noticed your main menu toolbar doesn't seem to be working correctly. It doesn't allow me to navigate from the home page to any of the insurance quote or customer service pages because the drop-down disappears when you navigate over it.

BlueprintMarketing

Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you. I would be more than happy to do that. In order to at the very most out of a crawl I would need access to Google Analytics. Just for the time of crawl.

What I'm going to do this combined wit what I'm going to do his combined SEM rush with deepcrawl.

I obviously will not charge you for this. let me look up how many pages your website days prior to confirming I will send you a private message and emailed or you can Google analytics once this is done you can delete it right away.

Would you do me a favor and use marketing.grader.com in order to show me approximately the size of your site.

I will and use SEM rush in addition because I think he may be ranking higher for keywords and use SEM rush in addition because I think you may be ranking higher for keywords that contain less traffic.

Another big thing that you have to think about did you use a link tool at your disposal Moz OSE, Ahrefs, Majestic & Google Webmaster tools so I can have deep crawl match up the back links with the new URLs? & tools/search console

in order to save yourself money and take it advantage of the Moz OSE, Ahrefs & Google Webmaster tools I strongly suggest that you sign up for a free trial using monitorbacklinks.com it comes with Ahrefs built in. You can add Moz , Majestic & GWT's via there API I can also upload any CSV file from any company like SEMRush exc.

I want to have the ability to she is much of the back link profile we will know so we're not missing something important.

Last but not least could you give me a rough idea of your web hosting set up? Would you mind running your website through. tools.pingdom.com

check your 301's using feedthebot.com (it redirects to a new domain but it is still the same tool set)

For Google Analytics tzickell (at) blueprintmarketing.com

shictins

Donna,

THE SITEMAP.... What great analysis! This could definitely be the problem. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

The company I'm currently working with created a separate sitemap for the blog than the main site but it does not look like they submitted it to WMT...

Would having two sitemaps but only submitting one to WMT cause the traffic to drop like this and not return?

shictins

This post is deleted!

DonnaDuncan

No. That's not the sole cause b/c I can still see blog content indexed on Google. It looks like you currently don't have Google Analytics tracking codes setup on the blog content, so any visits you are getting aren't getting captured in reports.

Also on the old site, you had two separate sets of Google Analytics tracking codes set up on the blog content (UA-743349-4 and UA-30229507-1). It's possible the code was firing twice causing double counting.

shictins

If don't have the analytics code set up on the blog pages, why would that affect my GWMT data?

Both GWMT and Analytics show a decline on the relaunch date. Would updating the title tags be the issue? Even without unique tags would it justify the huge drop?

I have a feeling it's a bunch of small things contributing to the drop in traffic and need help identifying the underlying cause of the decline. Thanks for your input.

DonnaDuncan

You're right. It wouldn't. Just the analytics.

Updating the title tags isn't the issue cause it looks like they didn't have unique title tags before the transition. But it should help boost organic traffic.

You may be right (it's a lot of small things). Have you looked at your traffic sources before and after to see if anything stands out? Is the drop evenly spread across direct, organic, PPC and referred traffic? Is it primarily in one area?

I'd be happy to take a look if you want to give me temporary access to your analytics and WMT. Sometimes it just takes a fresh pair of eyes.

shictins

I've identified it as only affecting organic search traffic, direct and referral were largely unaffected. I do not mind giving you read only access. What email should I grant access too?

DonnaDuncan

This post is deleted!

DonnaDuncan

Okay. I see a few things.

The vast majority of the lost traffic is from local (LA, San Fran & San Diego) locations. People searching for "car insurance", "cheapest car insurance", "cheapest car insurance California" and other similar keyword phrases. You no longer have a page on your site optimized for those terms so you're not showing up in search results.

It looks like you might have auto as a menu choice under "insurance items", but...

(1) It's hidden behind your site logo when the drop-down menu appears so visitors and search engine spiders can't get to it. It IS indexed. (I see it in your sitemap and when I do a site command.)

(2) On your old site, the home page was optimized for "Cheap Car Insurance in California". Now you're tending to use the term "auto" more than "car" and you're also not using the word "cheap" and "cheapest".

Two other observations: duplicate content and drive-to-learn 404.

(1) You've got a lot of duplicate pages on the site, e.g.

http://www.shiftins.com/blog/7-sins-car-insurance-buyers-make/
http://www.shiftins.com/blog/7-sins-car-insurance-buyers-make/www.shiftins.com

(See how the domain name is appended at the end of the second URL?) The later is redirected to the former, but it means you’ve got crawlers wasting a lot of time trying to index duplicate content and you're diluting your SEO equity. Of 269 pages, 267 are redirected duplicates.

(2) The drive-to-learn scholarship page is driving a lot of good traffic. But there appears to be a missing page (below). Visits to the 404 page stopped around the 19th, so you may have fixed this already.

/404.html?page=/content/insurance-program-application.aspx&from=http://www.shiftins.com/drive_to_learn_scholarship

I suggest trying to fix these things to see if it makes a difference. I also highly recommend the other item we talked about - indexing and optimizing the blog.

Your bounce rates, time on site, page views and conversions all appear to have improved since the new site was deployed. That's great!

If you want the list of queries that were driving impressions before the conversion (and now aren't), email me (so I get your email) and I'll pass them along.

shictins

"The vast majority of the lost traffic is from local (LA, San Fran & San Diego) locations. People searching for "car insurance", "cheapest car insurance", "cheapest car insurance California" and other similar keyword phrases. You no longer have a page on your site optimized for those terms so you're not showing up in search results. "

Just curious what section of the Analytics data are you looking at to make this determination? All of the pages I used to have were supposedly moved over to the blog then 301'ed. Was this really not done or were the pages not optimized properly?

**"(1) You've got a lot of duplicate pages on the site, e.g. **

http://www.shiftins.com/blog/7-sins-car-insurance-buyers-make/
http://www.shiftins.com/blog/7-sins-car-insurance-buyers-make/www.shiftins.com

(See how the domain name is appended at the end of the second URL?) The later is redirected to the former, but it means you’ve got crawlers wasting a lot of time trying to index duplicate content and you're diluting your SEO equity. Of 269 pages, 267 are redirected duplicates. "

Are all of these duplicate pages coming from the blog? How can I identify these?

**Your bounce rates, time on site, page views and conversions all appear to have improved since the new site was deployed. That's great! **

Thank you that was the idea behind the redesign. Now I just need the traffic back!

**If you want the list of queries that were driving impressions before the conversion (and now aren't), email me (so I get your email) and I'll pass them along. **

I would greatly appreciate the list. Please email me at "greasy(at)gmail.com"

BlueprintMarketing

Here is a photo showing that deep crawl is hard at work.

I've also added this URL which has a zip file that contains all your URLs your screaming frog crawl review and the pages that contain Google analytics the pages that do not and what UA number is attached to the page. http://d.pr/f/1f1AL

http://d.pr/f/1f1AL

I want to clear one thing up you cannot get duplicate hit's using Google analytics twice on one page as long as the UA numbers are different the only thing that will happen is your bounce rate will go down dramatically. ( I am talking about full JavaScript snippets) can have two UA's in the same snippet and be okay.

I started to crawl here is a bigger photo I will post it to you when I'm done I will look at the information I've sent you so far I think you will find it very valuable.

http://i.imgur.com/i0F739b.png

All the best,

Tom

http://d.pr/f/1f1AL

i0F739b.png

BlueprintMarketing

so far if you look at the Google analytics indexed URLs and site map URLs compared to the URis downloaded you should upload the site map I gave you in the last post screaming frog XML sitemap with a XML image sitemap will be a step in the right direction.

It is a larger photo

http://i.imgur.com/IIhIx7q.png

Tom

http://i.imgur.com/IIhIx7q.png

IIhIx7q.png

BlueprintMarketing

All done use the URL provided to go through every issue on your site. remember you can click on anything to see more there are thousands of problems you can look directly at and see a fix for.

IN the URL

You will see green arrows to click on you can also click on anything highlighted in red or if there is a word for a number member you can click on it and see a lot more than what you see in the very beginning.

You have a lot of broken links it also appears your canonical URL is non-www but you 301 redirect to www.

USE THIS URL TO SEE EVERYTHING:

http://crawl.blueprintmarketing.com/projects/reports/285433/overview?ro=9114686abd228be76929259279a1b634715066af

UES THIS FOR A summary http://d.pr/f/bvxB

Sorry it took me so long

Tom

DonnaDuncan

Excellent summary Thomas. Is that custom or are you using a paid tool to generate that?

DonnaDuncan

Thanks for clarifying the point about duplicate hits.

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Site Migration and Traffic Help!

Preparing for a Website Relaunch

Products

Moz Solutions

Free SEO Tools

Resources

About Moz

Why Moz

Get Involved