Recovering SEO traffic and rankings after a website redesign

After a review to con­firm a drop in traf­fic, there are some typ­i­cal prob­lems (like redi­rects, miss­ing pages and pro­to­col and domain issues) that can be fixed to get your SEO back on track.

When build­ing a new web­site, retain­ing and improv­ing your SEO and organ­ic traf­fic should be a key design goal. This requires a clear under­stand­ing of how SEO and web­site design work togeth­er and care­ful plan­ning for the site migra­tion. If every­thing is done cor­rect­ly, you should retain (and improve) rank­ings and traffic.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, in the real world, this is often not what hap­pens. The site launch­es. Organ­ic traf­fic tanks. And then pan­ic sets in. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I get a call like this every week. Most often from small busi­ness own­ers where the loss of organ­ic traf­fic means that leads or sales slow down and put the busi­ness at risk.

It is impor­tant to real­ize that all is not lost and in the major­i­ty of cas­es, there are a few usu­al sus­pects to blame for the loss of traf­fic. In this arti­cle, I cov­er how to diag­nose and recov­er traf­fic and rank­ings when a web­site design goes wrong.

Step 1 – Gathering Information

We don’t need a lot here but in an ide­al world we would want the following:

• Google Ana­lyt­ics
• Google Search Console
• Date of launch
• Web­site URL
• His­toric or alter­na­tive URLs
• His­toric key­word rank­ings (if available)

Step 2 – Confirmation

Now it’s time to dive into Google Ana­lyt­ics and Search Con­sole and review the traf­fic drop. What we are look­ing for here is a drop start­ing the day or week of the redesign. This drop may be slow and steady or often a sud­den, stark decrease.

As an exam­ple, the below image shows a 90 per­cent traf­fic drop. This was a failed redesign for a char­i­ty. They con­tact­ed us after this hap­pened and we did some pro-bono work to help them get back on track. This was prob­a­bly the worst case I have seen but it demon­strates how bad­ly things can go wrong with organ­ic traffic.

To fur­ther con­firm a big drop in traf­fic we can look at just organ­ic traf­fic or a vari­ety of chan­nels. If we see an organ­ic drop and oth­er chan­nels are rel­a­tive­ly unaf­fect­ed, then this fur­ther indi­cates that the redesign is the cul­prit here.

If you have Google Search Con­sole and key­word rank­ings then these can all be reviewed to help you con­firm the date of the drop.

Step 3 – Understanding the Losses

Before we can hope to improve things we have to under­stand the loss­es to aid us in our analy­sis and reme­di­a­tion. To do this we want to get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of key­word rank­ings and pages that were most affected.

Rank­ings

If you have his­toric rank­ing data then run these reports to get an overview of some key areas where posi­tions may have been lost. Where his­toric key­word rank­ings are not avail­able, some pop­u­lar SEO tools can pro­vide his­toric rank­ing data for analy­sis. Alter­na­tive­ly, the site own­er will typ­i­cal­ly have an idea of what key­words they used to rank for – this is not ter­ri­bly sci­en­tif­ic but it can give us an idea (which we can look to ver­i­fy in Search Con­sole if available).

Land­ing page traffic

We will want to com­pare before and after traf­fic in:

Google Ana­lyt­ics: Behav­ior > Site Con­tent > Land­ing Pages

If we have a few weeks (or longer) since the migra­tion we can com­pare to the peri­od pri­or and see which pages were gen­er­at­ing the most traffic.

This can be tricky as often page names change in a redesign. So, you have to iden­ti­fy the pages that ranked and received the most traf­fic and com­pare them to the coun­ter­part on the new site.

In the worst case sce­nario, we may find con­tent or pages that were present on the pre­vi­ous site but that has not been cre­at­ed on the new site. No con­tent. No traf­fic. If the con­tent exists on the new site but is just not receiv­ing traf­fic then we may be look­ing at more of a tech­ni­cal issue.

If this is a large site, it can help to put this infor­ma­tion in a spread­sheet so you can match up the old and new pages for easy reference.

I am a big fan of using the Way­back Machine here to view the pre­vi­ous ver­sion of the site: https://web.archive.org/. With this tool, we can take a look at these pages that were rank­ing and com­pare them to the rel­e­vant pages on the new site. Again, this can bet­ter help us under­stand phys­i­cal changes to the pages.

Step 4 – Usual Suspects

With an under­stand­ing of the loss­es we can look at the com­mon prob­lems and what we can do to put things right in each scenario.

Redi­rects

Redi­rects. Whether miss­ing or mis­con­fig­ured is the most com­mon issue we see. When launch­ing a new site, we want to do one of the fol­low­ing for all impor­tant pages:

• keep the URLs the same (ide­al)
• 301 redi­rect from the old page to the new page.

A sim­ple way to test this is to get togeth­er 10 or so of the high­est traf­fic URLs from the pre­vi­ous site (from ana­lyt­ics or the Way­back Machine) and attempt to vis­it these pages in a brows­er. If there is no redi­rect then this is part of your problem.

If the pages do redi­rect you need to check them in a tool like Scream­ingFrog or any online HTTP head­er tool (there are many free ones avail­able) to ensure that you see a 301 redi­rect to the cor­rect page.

A site own­er I was talk­ing to recent­ly had a basic grasp of SEO and had test­ed the redi­rects so was sure they were okay. When I checked the head­ers they were all 302 tem­po­rary redi­rects. That issue got fixed and traf­fic start­ed to climb back to orig­i­nal levels.

In anoth­er recent job, the in-house mar­ket­ing team had test­ed all old URLs and could see that they all had a 301 redi­rect in place. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, they had not checked the pages they were redi­rect­ed to as these were all 404s.

You real­ly have to test this end-to-end. In a brows­er. In a crawl­ing tool. Test all old URLs. Test redi­rect­ed pages. Make sure it works and ver­i­fy all impor­tant redirects.

Missing pages

Anoth­er com­mon issue is that con­tent that per­formed pre­vi­ous­ly is no longer on the site. If the con­tent does not exist, then you can’t rank. Ensure that all high traf­fic con­tent is present and the cor­rect redi­rects are in place.

This can take a bit more man­u­al effort but work through the high traf­fic pages that you iden­ti­fied in Step 3 and you can get an idea of what is hap­pen­ing. If those pages now just 404 or redi­rect to a gener­ic page (home­page is a dead give­away) then you like­ly have a con­tent issue.

Content changes

Changes to con­tent can also have an impact. If a page is present but the con­tent has been changed then you will need to per­form a qual­i­ta­tive review. Is the new page as good as the old page? What has changed? The web archive is your friend here.

Protocol and domain issues

If your site was pre­vi­ous­ly on http://example.com and with the new site you also make changes to the pro­to­col (https), sub­do­main (www), or domain then your redi­rects need to take this into con­sid­er­a­tion. https://www.example‑2.com is not the same as http://example.com. Here you just need care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion of how your redi­rects are put togeth­er and an atten­tion to detail regard­ing the domain, sub­do­main, and protocol.

Historic changes

In 2018, many sites have sev­er­al pre­vi­ous iter­a­tions, often with many changes to the pro­to­col, domain name, and sub­do­mains. We have seen cas­es where the migra­tion was seem­ing­ly han­dled well but traf­fic was still falling. The cause end­ed up being relat­ed to a his­toric change of domain which was not tak­en into consideration.

As an example:

2008 – 2016 the site ran on www.example.com
2016 – 2017 – the site used www.example‑2.com with www.example.com 301 redirected

When a new site was launched in 2018, the migra­tion was han­dled cor­rect­ly from the old to the new but the devel­op­ers had no knowl­edge of the pre­vi­ous domain and that his­toric redi­rect was nev­er put in place. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, in one key exam­ple the orig­i­nal domain that had over 10 years his­to­ry was lost.

The take­away here is to look back and under­stand any his­toric domain changes and redi­rects pri­or to this ini­tial design.

Tech­ni­cal issues

Some­times the new site is just not well put togeth­er and the prob­lems relate to the tech­ni­cal opti­miza­tion of the new site. Crawl issues, canon­i­cal URLs, index­a­tion – there is a lot that can go wrong. In this case, you will want to con­duct an SEO and web­site audit to ensure that the tech­ni­cal SEO is 100 per­cent dialed in.

Opti­miza­tion issues

As with tech­ni­cal, some­times the opti­miza­tion does not make it from the old to the new site. Sad­ly, we still see sites with the same page title on all pages and oth­er real basics just not done prop­er­ly. Crawl your site and make sure the basics are done correctly.

Tur­bu­lence

Some­thing else here to con­sid­er is the impact that a web­site migra­tion can have. This is some­thing at my agency that we call tur­bu­lence. The big­ger and more com­pli­cat­ed the site, the more tur­bu­lence we can see. The main point here is to be patient. Check every­thing. Dou­ble check every­thing. But if traf­fic is jump­ing around a bit for a few weeks as long as you are sure every­thing is in good order just hold steady whilst the new pages get indexed and the old­er pages fall out of the index.

Step 5 – What if Everything Seems Okay?

So you launched your new site. You had a sol­id migra­tion plan. You have checked every­thing over and there are no issues. But, you are still los­ing traf­fic. What gives?

Ana­lyt­ics

Is your ana­lyt­ics set up work­ing cor­rect­ly? Make sure all pages are cor­rect­ly tagged and are report­ing page views. Con­sid­er recent changes like AMP pages.

Algo­rithm Change

Did your web­site launch in the time­frame of a Google Algo­rithm change? The Pan­guin Tool allows you to map your ana­lyt­ics reports to a time­line of all Google updates. Using this tool you can iden­ti­fy if your traf­fic drop lines up with a spe­cif­ic algo­rithm update.

Sea­son­al­i­ty

Does your traf­fic always take a down­ward turn at this time of year? Review ana­lyt­ics for pre­vi­ous years and Google Trends to ensure this is not just a nat­ur­al downturn.

SERP changes

Changes to search engine page lay­outs can impact organ­ic traf­fic. Fea­tured snip­pets or even the move from three to four ads can have an impact on clicks. Ensure there are no mit­i­gat­ing fac­tors here.

Man­u­al penalty

If your SEO has not always been squeaky clean then it is worth check­ing you don’t have a man­u­al penal­ty. Log in to Search Con­sole and take a look under man­u­al actions.

Secu­ri­ty issues / Hacking

Hack­ing and secu­ri­ty issues can also impact traf­fic. If your site has been hacked you should get a noti­fi­ca­tion in Search Con­sole and your SERP list­ings will like­ly show a “This site may be hacked” or a “This site may harm your com­put­er” below your URL. Google does not always get this though, so run a site: com­mand for your URL to review indexed pages and iden­ti­fy any­thing suspicious.

Getting Back on Track

In an ide­al world, we would nev­er find our­selves in this sit­u­a­tion. We would ensure we know every­thing there is to know about SEO and web design and care­ful­ly plan for a site migra­tion to pre­serve our SEO.

But, if you do find your­self in this unde­sir­able sit­u­a­tion, then fol­low­ing the steps here should help you get your SEO back on track and your small busi­ness SEO on point once more.

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