4 tips to improve website traffic
Check Google Analytics
Has all site traffic ceased? If so, maybe analytical tracking didn’t make it to the new site. Check this manually. If you are receiving organic traffic, just at a reduced rate, run the site through Analytics checkup. It could be that a certain section of the site, such as the blog, doesn’t have proper tracking code placement. The scrape of all pages for tracking placement will identify issues.
Check robots.txt
If analytics passed inspection, now you know something is wrong. The first consideration is deindexation. Check the robots.txt file for “disallow: /” or in the head of page source code for a meta robots tag exclaiming noindex. If your site is typically crawled very frequently this can do damage very quickly and start killing rankings. If your site doesn’t enjoy frequent crawling, then this culprit can take days to a week before killing your online presence.
A Deeper Check of Google Analytics
Page Names Changed During the Relaunch
Was this URL rewrite architected well so that old URLs are 301 redirected to new pages? Review the organic traffic by landing page for those with the largest loss with a date range of the week prior to launch. Have those landing pages showing as top performers last week been redirected to new URLs?
Page Names Didn’t Change During the Relaunch
Once again, look at organic traffic by Landing Page. Look at post-launch vs. a comparable time pre-launch.
You still see the drop, but now open a secondary dimension by Keyword. Make an assessment of the keyword losses paired to their respective landing pages.
Check for Host or Server Issues
Analytics are fine, there are no de-indexation issues, all redirects (if applicable) are fine, and all keyword focus per page is fine. What gives?
Did you change hosting or server? Communication issues between visitors, the host and server can lead to a delay in content delivery or in fact a timing out of content. This leaves a search engine with no way to view the page.