Was your website recently redesigned? It’s a great feeling to know that your website is up to date and consistent with the latest trends in web design. Unfortunately, there are some problems that may need to be addressed, and one of them is retaining and improving your SEO and organic traffic. Ideally, a new website will allow you to keep your rankings and traffic, but we all know that things don’t work this way.
If your site went through a redesign but you’ve seen a drop in organic traffic, don’t fret. There are several ways you can identify and recover traffic and rankings for your new website.
Collect the Right Data
First, the following sources can be used to collect information on your traffic and rankings:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Date of relaunch
- Website URL
- Alternative URLs
- Historic keyword rankings
Review the Traffic Drop
Look at Google Analytics and Google Search Console to review the traffic drop. Identify what type of drop occurred. Was it a slow and steady decline or a sudden drop? If the traffic decline happened at the time of the redesign, you can verify that this is the culprit. Usually, this happens because the title tags and content don’t have the right keywords.
Understand Your Loss
Understanding your losses lets you get a better idea of the keywords and pages most affected. If you have historical keyword rankings, you can run these reports to see where your positions have been lost. If you don’t have historical keyword data, use your best judgement or take advantage of SEO tools that provide insight.
Landing page traffic is another way to understand your losses, though this can be tricky. Page names often change in redesigns or are not included at all. To analyze landing pages, look at the pages that received the most traffic and compare them to how they are doing now.
Assess the Problem
It’s hard to do A/B testing for SEO because you’re not testing for user satisfaction. Many site redesign problems happen because of the following issues:
- Redirects
- Missing pages
- Content changes
- Domain issues
- Historic changes
- Technical issues
- Optimization issues
If all of the above check out, it’s possible that another problem is to blame, such as an algorithm change, security issues or a penalty.
If you recently went through a redesign but have seen a huge drop in traffic or rankings, it doesn’t hurt to get a second opinion. Let Magna Technology take a look and evaluate the problems that are to blame. It won’t be long before your site is up and running with the same traffic and rankings as before.
