Massive drop in sales - how do I find out why?
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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
-
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. -
Yes, this is an ongoing issue, my client manages their own inventory so they often make changes without me knowing to stock levels/availability.
-
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.
-
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!
-
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)
-
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
-
Thanks Patrick, that's really useful info. I'll try some of these suggestions
-
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!
P -
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
-
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
-
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?
-
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!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why did our highly ranked keyword drop to 51+ for just one week?
One of our most important keywords (ranked 5) dropped to 51+ one week and then went back to 5 around the time we launched a new site. Why did that happen?
Technical SEO | | virtuance_photography0 -
Sitemap indexed pages dropping
About a month ago I noticed my pages indexed from my sitemap are dropping.There are 134 pages in my sitemap and only 11 are indexed. It used to be 117 pages and just died off quickly. I still seem to be getting consistant search traffic but I'm just not sure whats causing this. There are no warnings or manual actions required in GWT that I can find.
Technical SEO | | zenstorageunits0 -
Drop in Domain Authority and MozTrust -> -20% in traffic?
Hello Everybody,
Technical SEO | | uMoR
with the latest seomoz index update for OSE my website had a big drop in Domain Authority and MozTrust and at the same time a drop in SEO traffic. It seems to be a correlation between the drop in the Seomoz metric and SEO traffic, infact from the 9th of August we lost the 20% of traffic (the 2nd of august our DA and MT was normal, the 15th Seomoz show the drop). Unfortunately it seems that this trend is valid only for my website and not because of a Seomoz index error: my competitor still have the same DA and MT. I will check for sure if, with the next index update, there will be some change in DA or MT, anyway which are your suggestion? How can I know what has happened to my link profile and the cause of this big change? Advice are welcome!0 -
How does Google find /feed/ at the end of all pages on my site?
Hi! In Google Webmaster Tools I find *.../feed/ as a 404 page in crawl errors. The problem is that none of these pages exist and they have no inbound links (except the start page). FYI, it´s a wordpress site. Example: www.mysite.com/subpage1/feed/ www.mysite.com/subpage2/feed/ www.mysite.com/subpage3/feed/ etc Does Google search for /feed/ by default or why do I keep getting these 404´s every day?
Technical SEO | | Vivamedia0 -
Cn I use SEOMOZ to find "Bad Links"
We were hit by the Penguin update and I am told it make be because of "Bad Links", but no one can seem to tell me how to find them. We never buy links, and in fact the only links I know about are those from paid affiliates through shareasale - and these affiliates are paid based on performance, not links. 1. Does anyone know how to figure out what links are bad? 2. Once I know, how do I get them to stop linking to my site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Penalized by google. How to find out?
Our webpage performs very bad on some keywords relating to one product. At the SeoMoz-ranking page i can se we are number 9 but we have the highest (higher than our competitors) rating in almost every category (at least 25 of 30) on the keyword difficulty report. How do i find out why this is so, or if we have been penalized by google?On other search-engines (yahoo, bing etc) we are number one! And we have the highest pagerank among the competitors...
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
Google India Rankings Drop Suddenly
Keyword: indian wedding planner page:www.hukamievent.com/indian-wedding-planner.php It didn't drop, it just disappeared. No, I didn't do anything to be penalized at all and I am still in there index. I know this question has been asked many times here, while I apply all the suggestions given to other people with similar problem, here's a quick question I need to ask, I made following changes recently, could either of these be the reason for ranking decline? In google webmasters' tools, I had changed geographic target from - india, to- nothing, few weeks ago. could this be the reason. Around 2 weeks ago I paid someone to submit articles to 500 article directories, same article spun many times, he did the job in around 6 days and got back to me with a list of around 150 submissions with as many backlinks, all with same anchor text, "indian wedding planner", one of my targeted keywords. Before the submissions I was on page 9, yes that was nine, and just after the submission I was at page 2 position 1, within a matter few days. I saw my the targeted page improve in ranking and jump on to page one position 10, for a short while, before it disappeared. is this something they call "google dance"? My website is fluctuating on google SERP for many other keywords too, in most cases, my ranking fell. P.S.:With the same keyword,"indian wedding planner" my rankings in google US improved, I am on position 6 page 1. please enlighten fellow mozzers!
Technical SEO | | virtualhandshake0 -
Rankings Dropped Dramatically
Hi All, I need some advice on this one, one of our websites is performing very badly and I am lost to know why. We migrated from an old website www.myclient.co.uk and re-directed to www.myclient.com. The issue we had was that the old site relied on search results i.e. www.myclient.co.uk/search+villas+in+marbella However most ranked url's were not as tidy as the example above and had lots of characters. Because of this and the fact that all incoming links were to the homepage we do not carry out any 301 re-directs. In some keywords we have increased our rankings but for others we have dropped dramatically. keyword 1 4th Jan position 22 9th Jan position 90 keyword 2 4th jan position 34 9th jan position 89 keyword 3 4th jan position 12 9th jan position 16 (a smaller drop than the others) We do have some top 10s for this domain so I don't think we have been penalised for anything but I am shocked to see such drops in rankings. I have setup the website so that each page targets different keywords and I have checked and they get A grades within SEOmoz. Any advice would be really appreciated, as the client is not too happy at the moment. Many thanks Andy
Technical SEO | | iprosoftware0