Going Backward to Move Forward

Recently we rebuilt a website for a client. Within two weeks of the rebuild, two things happened:

1. The traffic to her site dropped by about half.
2. Her site conversions quadrupled.

Those two statistics might seem contradictory, but they actually are not. She was getting less traffic, but it was higher quality traffic.

Previously, her traffic had contained many “near miss” searches. Keywords that were in her site, but which were not targeted to her clients. Revision of the site pulled in more relevant searches.

Traffic dropped due to two causes:

1. Her page URLs changed. This resulted in a temporary drop, until the new pages indexed. We did not redirect, because of the cost involved due to the change in site structure.
2. The irrelevant searches dropped out from the stats, almost completely. Previously, 80% of the searches had been irrelevant. After the change less than 5% of the searches were irrelevant, resulting in an overall increase in quality traffic.

If you have SEO done to your site, and your traffic drops, you may feel a sense of panic, wondering why all that work resulted in a drop. But before you feel like your time or money was wasted, look at the search terms, and see whether the drop was due to losing irrelevant traffic. That traffic wasn’t doing you any good anyway.

Typically, when a site is badly optimized, you will have a high quantity of irrelevant traffic. And generally when your site is re-indexed, you will LOSE the irrelevant traffic BEFORE you gain much in the way of increased relevant traffic. So watch it for two months, and see whether the initial drop is followed by slow growth trends in the good traffic. If, after two months, the stats show a continuing decline, then the optimization was not done right, especially if combined with an increase in irrelevant search terms, or an increase in partial search terms (only one or two words that are out of context). Bad results often happen from “hit and run” SEO – someone who stuffs your page full of meaningless keyword strings but fails to incorporate high quality marketing text into the site.

Watch the trends, and don’t be alarmed by a temporary drop – instead, look for the reasons why it is occurring. If it occurred for the right reasons, you should see the traffic pick back up so that you not only regain what you lost, but you continue to gain ground long term.