Site traffic/sales have plummeted

[Aquatell]

About 2 months ago we relaunched our Ecommerce store on Shopify Plus and have since seen a massive drop in traffic, sales and our most valuable pages are nowhere to be found. Also, GWT is showing that Google is indexing about half of our pages and none of the images are being indexed.

We did extensive keyword research, created/implemented a keyword framework, wrote brand new category/product page content, implemented schema markup, optimized our blog content and even did link building where we got some 90+ DA links.

We are literally at a loss for what is causing this. Our experience with Shopify Plus has been very poor because it doesn't even do basic SEO stuff so we've had to do a lot of workarounds to make it "SEO friendly".

Has anyone else ever switched to Shopify Plus and had similar issues? Is there a silver bullet that you can think of that we are missing that could get the site being indexed/ranking again?

[ECN]

Because most will want to know before they answer but what was your redirect strategy from the previous platform?

[Aquatell]

We setup 301 redirects for every product and every category page. The old system had 10,000+ plus category pages due to an issue with the platform but all of these were created by different paths to the same page. Eg. /mens-shoes/blue-shoes and /blue-shoes/mens-shoes, etc.

We tested everyone of the product and most of the category redirects (we focussed mostly on the ones with PA/DA) and have since been adding additional redirects as errors have been appearing in GWT.

[LauraSultan]

It's really a shot in the dark without knowing the website URL, but there are probably multiple issues going on.  If Google is only indexing half of your pages, it's probably a crawl issue or a meta robots issue.  Check to make sure the pages aren't being blocked or noindexed. If that isn't the problem, you may have a problem with crawl inefficiency.

[Aquatell]

Here is the URL: http://www.aquatell.ca

[LauraSultan]

Laurie, when you say that your most valuable pages are nowhere to be found, can you provide an example?

[Aquatell]

Our most valuable page is http://www.aquatell.ca/pages/water-softeners and that page used to show up at the bottom of page 1/top of page 2 for "water softeners", but now we can't find it within the first 20 pages of Google.

[LauraSultan]

This page is set to "noindex," so you've essentially told Google not to index it.

[Aquatell]

Well that's new. I just checked a fetch I did in GWT a few days ago and that wasn't there. The canonical is wrong too. I'll have to get my developer to fix that.

Thank you Laura for pointing that out.