Hi,
so last year i redesigned our website and was hopeful that it was an improvement in both UX and SEO.
But it just seems to be struggling. We’ve gone from ~55% bounce to 72% and visitor numbers have reduced.
I’ve done everything i can think is obvious to try.
All the pages have description, keywords, titles.
I’ve used heading tags
I’ve validated the pages
Page speed is pretty fast i think at Mobile-69 Desktop-83 on the pagespeed checker.
It gets an 8 on nibbler (room for improvement as my other site is 9.2 but ok i think)
It passes the google mobile checker and webmaster tools isn’t reporting any pages with problems
I’ve added links to specific searches from the front page trying to get in the words people use to find our site.
I’ve done peek user testing to see what real people actually click on
submitted a sitemap to webmaster tools (been there for over a year)
Is there something i am missing? I don’t think we are being googled as well as it was.
sorry missed that off the list. We actually have more content than before and pull in live data we didn’t have last year. Although perhaps google is seeing that the page content isn’t changing much, might have to think how to keep the pages fresh. Trouble is there are 1200 beaches we have info for and it doesn’t actually change that much. We have live tides and weather and water quality but we don’t change the other content often as it doesn’t really need it as such.
Another idea to throw in, given the subject matter. Is interest in your site seasonal? Maybe traffic will pick when (if) summer arrives.
I would agree, bounce rate, for informational sites, can be a sign that SEO is good and SEs are taking people directly to the content they seek.
But if visits overall are down, it’s a bad sign.
It certainly is seasonal and does depend on the weather over the years but just seems consistently down this year. (like the weather )
Something we did change was to put all the info pages onto basically one long index page. So perhaps where in the past a user would click ‘water quality’ and go to a different page, they are now just jumping down the page to an anchor (as i assume that does not count as a different page)
Search engine algorithms are a bit of an enigma, so I’m not certain, but it may be that putting all sections on a single page has diluted each sections ranking in its subject by sharing a page with other things. As in Google sees it as a single article about “various stuff” rather than one about a specific topic.
No, it does not count as a different page. But you could try the new semantic elements (article, section ect…) and/or structured data to identify different sections as separate individual items on a page. no guarantee it will work, but it won’t hurt if done properly. I’m not sure if the SEs take notice of the semantic tags, but Google does like structured data mark up.
Try to add a good visible, extended navigation menu which includes the themes the site is about. For SE visibility change your one long index page back to different category pages. Site looks not bad but I got a bit lost to find through.
Perhaps a regularly updated blog would add more educational content to your website while allowing your page to change more frequently as quality, relevant content is added on a weekly or bi-weekly basis?
We did used to have a news feed on the homepage of our latest news. So perhaps that had more of an impact than i thought. hmm something to try at least.
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