Massive drop in sales - how do I find out why?
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I am working with my client managing/maintaining their online store.We have been making big improvements to onsite SEO, improved URL structures (complete with re-directs) etc, we use Yoast Premium to optimise pages for search and Yoast Local.
We have a bounce rate of around 20%, however, suddenly in mid August, our revenues virtually vanished overnight. Moz is reporting a search visibility drop of 51%, while visitor levels remain fairly average, certainly no drops that can be compared with the sudden loss of conversions.
I am at a loss and cannot fathom why our sales have dropped.
Can anyone suggest where I might look?
Many thanks
Bob
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Hmm, that is very odd and I'm sure extremely frustrating.
I would use Google Search Console to look at the pages seeing the biggest decrease and see if your ranked position has drastically changed. I would assume either you were hit with an algorithm update or competitors have really upped their efforts which would have impacted your rankings.
Sorry I don't have a more definitive answer, but I hope that helps!
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Hi,
Thanks for your quick response, interestingly, our main competitor saw a 15% search visibility rise, and a few other competitors like us saw a large fall. Does this lend weight to your theory that perhaps it's external factors and the biggest competitor raising their game?
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hi Bob,
You have not provided enough information or website URL for anyone to answer accurately, anything we reply here would be mere speculation.
Please provide more details about the website and when exactly was done prior to sales drop.
That's the reason, we have culturally created an environment within our organization to LOG everything we do on our client sites.
Regards,
Vijay
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Hi Vijay,
No significant changes were made in the period that we feel would have the impact that we have seen.
The website/checkout experience tests fine, we are still receiving a trickle of orders, but not the volume we were enjoying before.
Please see my response to the above reply, it appears we are not the only player in our sector who has seen a drop, several competitors have seen a similar drop in search visibility too.
The website is www.glassesonspec.co.uk.
If there is any other specific information you think would be useful, then do please let me know.
Many thanks
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Hi there
I would make sure that you properly 301 redirected all old URLs to new URLs. If you are not, Google could be having a hard time understanding you moved your URLs. I would then check your robots.txt and meta tags to make sure you aren't accidentally blocking your site from search engines.
Take a look at your competitor with competitor research. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What are they doing that I am not?
- What changes have they made that I haven't?
- Are they leveraging Schema?
- What kind of content are they developing?
- What links do they have?
After that, I would also make sure your eCommerce tracking is properly tracking, sometime this can get wonky, especially with URLs changing. Please review this, especially Enhanced eCommerce.
Lastly, one of my favorite resources for this comes from InFlow with their Rankings and Traffic Drop Checklist. It's packed with tips and places to look.
Start there and see what happens! Let me know if you need more help! Good luck!
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Thanks Patrick, that's really useful info. I'll try some of these suggestions
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I use a spreadsheet to track my top 10 competitors, every time the new DA index is released. By watching our competitors, I can see trends and seasons in our markets and how algorithm changes affect us and them. Most of the time, the majority of us see the same increases and reductions. This is not an immediate answer bc it takes a long time to populate enough data to begin measuring, but after a while, it very valuable when the owner comes knocking.
KJr
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Had a quick look through your shop, found this page: https://www.glassesonspec.co.uk/cheap-prescription-sunglasses/mens-sunglasses/wayfarer-style-cd1038/
I would look into the styling of your page, it's not utilising the width as well as I would think you could. I would personally make the content below the list "included with every pair" use the full width (image/description)
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Hey Thomas,
Thanks for your feedback. This is a planned update actually. We have a unique requirement where our products require a lot of options to be provided as you have seen. Unfortunately, due to the way the product page is constructed in the theme we are using, it puts those options prior to the checkout button in an area that should only take up the header.
I am about to update the theme to a major update released last week. Once that is done we are going to have a custom product page template created to put everything back in the right place
Currently, because of the options placement, if we activate the tabs section, they appear at the foot of the page!Complete nightmare!
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Completely understand the problem!
Another thing I would look at is this: https://i.gyazo.com/f00555df1f7dcc374785d29c8ed4d9cb.png
You can see on that page there are three out of stock products. I would (if you can) push these down the results. As in the top 6 (above the fold) I can see one out of stock. You're missing an opportuntity here to sell that product.
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Yes, this is an ongoing issue, my client manages their own inventory so they often make changes without me knowing to stock levels/availability.
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Hi,
I agree with Blue Corona, As there was a algo update few weeks ago, if you check your Google consol you would be able to see.
in my opinion, you need to cosinder update in order to determin the fall. -
Hi Bob,
Although people are blaming it some Algo update for the drop, yet I would like to keep my focus on conversion rate drop ( if you framed you question correctly, that there is not much drop in visitors compared to sales).
I tried using your website to find anything that was amiss and the only fault I could find which can directly correlate to sales is that Javascript alerts for order validation, If this dialogue is suppressed, validation fails and order can't be processed.
https://postimg.org/image/6axhg8yw5/
Please look into it.
Regards,
Vijay
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Hi Vijay, this is really helpful.
We recently changed the product options framework for the website, and I know the previous options solution had a pop up warning for the completion of the prescriptions fields.
We are now however using a completely different solution for the prescription form, and it's possible that there is some code left over from our previous solution.
I am no longer using the developer who created the previous options framework, so can you tell me if there is a way we can track down where this code is?
For our current options, this is all handled by Gravity Forms in WordPress, so I don't think that will be causing the problem.
Thanks again for your helpful suggestion.
Bob
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Further to the above, I think I've solved that issue. There was an error on that product you used as your example, it was loading an attribute as a variation that didn't exist.
I've removed it now.
