New website and sales are down? Please help!

[pxoxrxn]

Hi everyone, we recently upgraded the website at work and the sales have dropped from an average $6 000 a week to $2 000. My boss is not happy with the costly upgrade, but realizes it potential as its a much better looking website. We sell adult products an we have fierce competitors, but their websites don't look as good as ours.

Has anyone else experienced a loss in sales due to upgrade? Also, if there any main reasons why the site may be performing badly? If you would like, I can PM you a link.


Cheers

 

[laowai]

Did your traffic drop also or only the sales?

If your traffic dropped, maybe you changed your URL structure or the content of the main pages which could affect your rankings. If the traffic is same maybe the design is not as good as you think and visitors are bouncing.

Try to first understand why the drop happened by looking your stats.

 

[beatngu]

Yes i have had the same problem as you.
It all depends how much your site was changed in the upgrade.
Say you ranked nr1 for sex toys and your url was www.yourdomain.com/sextoys
If the url was changed during the upgrade to something like this www.yourdomain.com/category/sextoys you will loose all ranking for that url because it is changed.
You backlinks would point to a old url.

You do not want to change to much on the layout when you upgrade,and it's always a risk to upgrade.
Sometime it takes a while before google finds your new urls if they have been changed.

You should check your ranking and check for any drops

 

[pxoxrxn]

Traffic has dropped, but not significantly. I can't see the drop resulting in a 50% cut in sales. However, I can see it being a factor in some of the loss. The URL structure did change but from the keyword research I have done so far, I think our rankings have improved for most keywords. We changed from a .com to a .com.au and I think that was a good move because we are only targeting Australian traffic and google seems to like the .com.au over the .com when targeting Australia.

I am just wondering if anyone has had this problem, but then saw sales increase over time. I am thinking that maybe people are just not familiar with the website yet and are a bit hesitant to buy. We have suggested give-aways to try and break the barrier but our boss just wants to give a shitty cockring or little vibrator.

Is there any other marketing avenues we could use to try and break through? We have a mailing list of about 1000 people and send out an email every month (not always on schedule). Should we maybe increase it to fortnightly for a couple of months? We just don;t want to spam people and make them want to opt-out.

 

[umerjutt00]

It is happening because you changed the domain name. It will take some time for the ranking to come back. Remember to list this change of URL in the Google Webmaster Tools.

 

[pxoxrxn]

It is happening because you changed the domain name. It will take some time for the ranking to come back. Remember to list this change of URL in the Google Webmaster Tools.

Yeah I have submitted a sitemap and I have been submitting is every second day or so because we have been constantly adding products ect...

Thanks for the advice and I hope we do get some of the rankings back.

 

[Conor]

If it ain't broke...
Normally I'm all for aesthetic improvements... But in this case I have to say I'd rather have $6000 over $2000.

 

[pxoxrxn]

If it ain't broke...
Normally I'm all for aesthetic improvements... But in this case I have to say I'd rather have $6000 over $2000.

Yeah, no shit but we didn't expect the sudden drop. My boss say that we broke the #1 rule of business.

We are working hard to get it back up and running, just wondering is BHW had any advice on possible reasons.

 

[egategat]

create another new version and A/B split test it. Find which of the two is performing better compare it to the old site. Give it at least couple of weeks if still you are not seeing improvements then check your old url. Or better switch to the old site while you are figuring out the problem.

 

[Narrator]

Is the new site less mobile friendly? Keep in mind mobile devices are slowly taking over as people's primary internet device.

You said the traffic only dropped slightly, did the bounce rate increase?

If you are using G Analytics check out the exit funnels to see if people are leaving from a certain page. With a new design it is possible that there is a dead link somewhere that may have been missed.

Also it may seem obvious but if it is an eCommerce site check that the SSL cert if configured properly, I had a client that forgot to renew their cert and the sales dropped considerably.

If you want to PM me the url I could check it out to see if I have any other ideas.

Cheers!

 

[solomayne]

you changed your domain extension? Thats like starting all over with a fresh domain, which will be dancing in the serps sadly.

 

[ChapoGuzman]

Yeah, no shit but we didn't expect the sudden drop. My boss say that we broke the #1 rule of business.

We are working hard to get it back up and running, just wondering is BHW had any advice on possible reasons.

everyone told you everything already.

you basically just created a new site.

Domain is different, Url Structure is different. etc.

So your ranking dropped.

But like you said the traffic did drop but you dont think it was enough to cause a massive drop from 6k down to 2k so maybe the majority of it has to do with the new improvement.

Maybe the site looks good but difficult to navigate, maybe something broken somewhere the kart? checkout? something.

If I was you or your boss, I'll manually check every single link out out, product etc and simulate a purchase till the end with every product cause 4 grand a week down the drain is a big loss.

that 800K a year gone! over what can possibly be a broken link.

 

[Emp1!]

OP, your company did something very dumb (no offense). Changing the domain is the same as changing your phone number. Yellow Pages / Google do not know the new one yet.

At the very least, I hope your managed to do 301 redirect from the old website to the new one? You have to explain to visitors and search engine where is the content now. If you did not create 301: do it ASAP. If you were helped by SEO company on this project, just fire them.

Regards

 

[Narrator]

It's also important to keep in mind the conversion rates between keywords. You said the traffic dropped but not much, check out the keywords that did drop they may be the ones that converted the best.

For example, ranking for "widgets" might bring in a lot of traffic but not much sales. But "buy blue widgets" will bring in less traffic at a lot higher conversion rate.

 

[pxoxrxn]

Thanks for all the advice. We have done 301's from all the old domains (Shit was messy) to the new website. I have been going through and trying to find any 404's and putting 301's on them to the correct product page. I think it may be due to serps because we are still ranking with the old domains that now have 301's on them and have done for about 3 weeks.

I don;t think a comparison between two sites would be fair. The current domain has been in the industry for around 13 years now while a new domain wouldn't have a good enough chance for comparison.

The SSL is configured correctly and we have followed through from start to finish, with payments and everything.

I think it may be due to unstable rankings ect... I guess that should improve with time.

 

[dannym954]

You're very lucky to be making 2k right now considering this is basically a new site right? Maybe the 2k is repeat business from a redirect or your mailing list? I don't think you have much of a problem here, you'll just have to keep at your regular SEO and wait for the results.

 

[john1444]

Familiarity could be a big problem. Customers react to little changes you make on a website not to talk of the type your company did. And another thing is, the upgrade might look better but not converting well, little wonder some sites look like shit yet they make the most money and the owners refusing to advance.

 

[medway]

I think it may be due to unstable rankings ect... I guess that should improve with time.

How much of a traffic drop then? You stated earlier that there wasn't that much of a drop. Sounds like it's a combination of the two. Did the previous site have lots of conversion optimization? You'll probably need to do the same on the new site to test what works.

 

[SkyrocketSEO]

My boss say that we broke the #1 rule of business.

Don't change horses in midstream?

 

[IamNRE]

Try to visit the website from different browsers and screen resolution and see if everything loads alright.