In some cases, a redirect problem may be the cause. Website redirects make a webpage accessible under multiple website addresses. When someone clicks on a link to open it, it takes them to a different link.
This can happen for various reasons, but when it happens, it means that your website pages are not indexed. This is because when search engine website crawlers enter these pages, they are redirected to another URL. Therefore, search engines rank based on the target URL instead of your URL.
Website Architecture
Changes in site architecture may also be a factor. Site architecture philippine country code helps tell search engines the nature of a site, how to navigate it, and how to find all the pages there. For a law firm, having a solid site architecture includes organizing content in a hierarchy, with major topics as home pages, and then subtopics (such as practice areas) as subpages.
Changes to Website Content
Content changes can also affect traffic. If your website already has good traffic, but you remove some or all of the content that originally attracted visitors, then you will directly see a drop in traffic. SEO rankings depend on content quality, and sometimes it is necessary to remove old content and add new content. However, this may cause a drop in website traffic.
For example, if you remove pages that are ranked high in the Baidu and Google algorithms, regardless of whether they are important or not, you will lose keywords. This means that Baidu and Google now consider other pages to be more valuable to searchers than your pages.
Before you actually begin a complete website redesign, make sure you have a strategy in place to help optimize for your target keywords.
index
Are some pages not being indexed correctly? It can be hard to know what's going on at first, but you can use Google's index checker (called the URL Inspection tool) to help you see if this is happening. For example, the search engine won't index pages that are blocked by robot.txt rules or the no-index tag. It also won't index pages that are duplicates of other pages on your site.
If you use this tool and discover that certain pages that should be indexed are not, you will be able to focus your attention on those issues, which may help increase your traffic.
Website Performance
Is the website performing well? Technical issues are a common reason for traffic drops. For example, if your website takes more than a few seconds to load due to a new design, this will affect its organic performance. Long loading times often cause people to exit the site and look for other options.
If you add new content to your site from an old site and mistakenly incorporate old URLs without proper redirects, you could end up with some broken links that limit your overall success.
Tracking Code
You also need to make sure your Google Tag Manager or other tracking code is enabled correctly. Do not copy it; if you do, this will skew your tracking and provide less accurate metrics. This will also limit search engine bots from crawling your site to index it.
How to determine why traffic has dropped after a website redesign
You can use a variety of tools to help you investigate the cause of the traffic drop and ultimately take steps to find a viable solution. You can then continually update your current site to ensure it performs at a higher level than your old site.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is one of the best options for analyzing traffic changes. It can help with a full site migration, but in this case, its power lies in pinpointing potential site issues and improving efficiency.
For example, after launching a new website, you can use it to:
Crawl the new site to make sure it is indexable
Check your analytics tracking
Screaming Frog has access to complex and very valuable data. However, it does not analyze that data or provide any specific improvement strategies. At Panlongsheng, we leverage our industry expertise and such tools throughout the redesign process to uncover key improvement opportunities.
Google Robot.txt Tester
Using the robot.txt tester, you can see if your robots.txt file is blocking Google's website crawler and thus limiting your site's ranking.