Big Drop in Sales

[shamrockonline]

I changed to Prestashop from a Virtuemart store about a year ago. I love Prestashop, it's so much more stable and user friendly. BUT I have seen a steady decline in sales ever since the change. Which makes no sense, as it's a faster, cleaner and easier buying experience than before. My products haven't changed, my prices haven't changed, I'm at a loss as to why this is happening. Any suggestions?

[backamblock]

Do you have an URL to your store?

[shamrockonline]

www.shamrockshirts.com.au

[bellini13]

Prior to the migration to PS, did you ever tracking where your sales originate from?

[jordiob]

Hi, are you referring to your sales coming from SEO? did you redirect the old URLs to the new ones?

[karolwild]

https error - ?

301 redirect - ?

The description on the homepage, category, product - ?

<title> - ?

Meta "description" - ?

[ajensen27]

Hi, are you referring to your sales coming from SEO? did you redirect the old URLs to the new ones?

 

I really hope you did this because if not, your SERP's in Google (or any search engine for that matter) are all wiped after 1 year.

[jordiob]

I really hope you did this because if not, your SERP's in Google (or any search engine for that matter) are all wiped after 1 year.

 

Well, it might be sooner than a year. I've seen rankings drop within a week and results being wiped in 1 month

[shamrockonline]

I didn't redirect old URLs, I wouldn't have a clue how to do that, and I have no idea what a SERP even is!

[bellini13]

the concept is simple.  You had an old website using Virtuemart store.  And on that store you had some products which get indexed into search engines. 

The have some URL like

www.domain.com/url/to/some/product

 

People perform searches in search engines and they find that product URL and click on it.  Things work fine

 

Now you migrate to Prestashop, and the URL of that product has likely changed to something else

www.domain.com/1-someproductname.html

 

However google and other search engines do not know that you have changed to Prestashop and have new URLS.

 

So now people are trying to access your old URL because that is what the search engines have

www.domain.com/url/to/some/product

 

Those URLs no longer exist and eventually the search engines remove them.  That leads to a drop in sales.

[jordiob]

I didn't redirect old URLs, I wouldn't have a clue how to do that, and I have no idea what a SERP even is!

Ok, so that's the reason why your seo traffic dropped and might be one of the reasons why your sales dropped as well

[ajensen27]

I didn't redirect old URLs, I wouldn't have a clue how to do that, and I have no idea what a SERP even is!

 

Well that's the reason your sales dropped. SERP = Search Engine Results Page

 

At this point, using .htaccess redirects will most likely be useless. You're going to have to just try to get good rankings again.

[DazzieG]

It depends if you have links to the old page url's. If not then Google will just recrawl and index your "new" content version and then should put it back, though a year is a fairly long time in seo online, what worked then might be different now. If new sites are in the search results selling t shirts then even if you had re-directed the old pages you might still be off the rankings from before because they have optimised more than you. So in summary if you had links from elsewhere pointing to product pages then it might be worth putting a redirect in still depending on what links they were.