Site Doing Horrible After Redesign

[jesse-landry]

Have you looked into OpenCart? I don't have a ton of experience with e-com sites but I've heard good things about this from developer standpoints. It's claim to fame is being open source, anyway...

[AWCthreads]

Do you believe your site requires complete access to the template?

[josh330]

Thanks Dennis.  Our SEO found quite a few pages that had good ranking that are now returning 404s. Is that what you mean by the the 301 being to blame?

[josh330]

Thanks for the response.  I'm only going off some of the things we were told to implement that we can't because that code is off limits. Can't implement canonical tags on home page, can't get rid of the https versions of all pages (home page, product pages, etc), can't put the blog on the root domain, etc.  It sounded like a big deal to me, but SEO and coding is not what I do, so I really wouldn't know any better.

[josh330]

I have not. I will mention that to our developer and see if she's heard of it.

[DennisSeymour]

Definitely a possible reason as you are already losing traffic from it already. Something you should look at ASAP. Those pages should be redirecting to the correct, new pages so I'm wondering why they werent properly 301'ed. Was the 301 service only sending your previous homepage to the new homepage and not per page? (Or even old pages to the new homepage)

[AWCthreads]

Were you ranking well prior to the move?

[AWCthreads]

Also, is your developer and SEO the same?

Just curious if you were getting input from both angles or the same direction.

[josh330]

Yes, we were. Page 1, between position 3 and 7 on our main niche keywords.

[josh330]

Our developer and SEO are different folks and my relationship with each of them is completely independent from the other.  Great question though.

[AWCthreads]

Interesting. So you were ranking well on a hosted platform.

[josh330]

You are absolutely correct.  A different platform, but a hosted one nonetheless.

[josh330]

You can see why I'm so confused!

[AWCthreads]

You may be in need of a second opinion.

[AWCthreads]

Dennis is giving you a good one and I can make a recommendation for your SEO services if you wanna pm me.

[josh330]

It was supposed to be every page and I was charged $600+ just for the redirecting part of the process separate and part from the design.

[erikellsworth]

Curious why you didn't keep your current Volusion URLs?  With BigCommerce (which we are a partner), you can match the Volusion URL and forego the 301 redirect if you feel that's critical to your SEO success.  A proper 301 redirect should be adequate and not account for such a dramatic drop of traffic.

As an ecommerce consultant you need to understand where your traffic was coming from and make sure that's protected when you move.  For example, if your products have a lot of Facebook Likes, when you change the URL, you will lose 100% of those Likes...and this should be a factor in choosing a new platform.

You should be able to diagnose what's happening from your Google Analytics.  Take a look at where traffic has dropped.  What landing pages were driving traffic before and no longer are?  What keywords have disappeared and what pages were appearing for those keywords?  Are those pages 301'd correctly?  What products and categories were driving your traffic and revenue?

Obviously check all your pages for proper meta tags (INDEX, FOLLOW)...with these "simple" platforms, it is easy to accidentally make your whole store disappear.

It sounds to me like something was missed during the migration and you're now.  We are a top Volusion consulting firm and have worked on hundreds of stores...and we're partners of both BigCommerce and 3dcart.  You can have a successful store on a hosted platform.  Having PHP access is not critical to your success.  Yes, it can help but you migrated from Volusion which has much more restrictions than BigCommerce (in terms of what you can accomplish from a template perspective and SEO)...so I feel we're missing something here.

[josh330]

Thank you Erik for the reply.  I switched the URLs based on the recommendation that the BC URLs were much more user friendly.  For example www.website.com/myproduct/ was better than www.website.com/category1_myproduct/269.html.

I feel we're missing something too!

[erikellsworth]

www.website.com/category1_myproduct/269.html could be more powerful than www.website.com/myproduct/ but it could also be weaker.  You've added in the category name which may be redundant (I'm not sure without more information) and you've weakened the power of "myproduct" brought to your SEO.  Plus, you have now removed the 269 which for most people is the manufacturer's SKU or UPC code which many people search.

If a lot of your traffic was SKU-related (which you can easily find in your analytics), then you definitely took a step backwards instead of forwards.

Yes, BC gives you much greater flexibility and power with your URLs, but you need to carefully evaluate how to use that power and really understand your current traffic and its origins.

[josh330]

Thank you Erik, I understand what you are saying.  These are things I did not know which is why I had hired the company to handle the migration.  They came highly recommended from BC and I trusted that they would do this stuff all the time. I make equipment for dogs, which I am good at.  I know that I know nothing about full website migrations, but I believed a trusted BC partner would.

The 269 in my example was the Volusion category ID, not the SKU.

Identifying these things in Analytics is not what I would call easy for me. I can tell I am going to have to learn a lot more about this subject if I want to understand things which is why I joined this community. The first order of business is to get our site back where it was. Does it sound to you like it can be addressed on the current platform?