I redesigned a clients website and there is a pretty massive drop in traffic - despite my efforts to significantly improve SEO.

[binkez32]

Hi there,

I redesigned a clients website that was very old fashioned and was not responsive. I implemented 301 redirects, kept the content pretty similar, website linking structure very similar - the only things i changed was making the website responsive, improved title tags, added a bit more information, improved the footer and h1 tags etc..

however although clicks are fairly similar search impressions have dropped about 60% on average over the past week.

The old site had some keywords linking to pages with no new content so i removed those as seemed like black hat seo tricks and also there was a huge list of "locations we deliver to" on the homepage followed by around 500 citys/towns I removed this. Could this be the cause for the drop? as i assumed those would do more harm than good?

Fairly new with SEO as you can probably tell. Looking for advice on what may be the cause and what steps I should take now.

Thanks for reading!

duGeW

[LoganRay]

Hi,

Patience, young padawan, it's only been a week  

It's basically impossible to redesign a website without some organic traffic loss. There's a lot for search engines to consider, everything they previously knew about your website is gone, they have to learn your new site architecture, URL structures, content, meta data, etc. etc.

It sounds like you covered all the most important bases and got rid of some old school tactics. Give it some time, you should start to see a rebound in a few weeks. The worst thing you can do is panic and try to fix a bunch of stuff that isn't actually broken.

[binkez32]

Hi Logan,

Thanks for the response! Haha. That is what i thought originally, however I read that a drop of around 5% is normal so 50%+ had my alarm bells ringing! (although the website only has a small amount of traffic)

There was a few other factors that worried me like the old site was .htm but I .301 redirected every page to the new ones with .html

I will try not to worry and hopefully things will improve within the next week or so.

Thanks again.

[badgergravling]

Is it a small, local type business by any chance?

Despite what a lot of best practice will say regarding location pages - they still work for a lot of small, local busineses, particularly in uncompetitive niches. Generally, I'd say 500 cities/towns is massively overdoing it, and there are a lot less spammy ways of achieving something similar, but it may well have contributed to the hit...

If the clicks are the same, then actually it's fine. No one was visiting and buying via the impressions you've lost. However, I'd say it's worth looking at the location/local SEO optimisation again and redoing it in a less spammy way to ensure your client won't panic if they ever look at impressions in Google Search Console (Pretty unlikely for most clients)...

[Harsha_kulkarni]

This post is deleted!

[Harsha_kulkarni]

Hey Logan,

We did a redesign+migration from as.net to Wordpress. We launched in February 2017 & still struggling to get back where we were. Almost 80% traffic loss.

Any specific pointers that get missed during these kinds of migrations, is it normal to loose this much traffic?

Please help

[Harsha_kulkarni]

Thanks for your reply Dan.

It's an International site. Our target audience is from India, Middle East countries, and East Asia.

Google has indexed https version and looks good, but after all the on page optimization also, the traffic not going up, however, we are ranking for more keywords than ever.

I've attached the screenshot of traffic stats from Jan to June, if that will help pinpoint issues.

Thanks again

lAJf0