Should I be nervous?????

[turboguy]

I tend to answer questions more than ask them but here goes.

We have a number of web sites for my business. Basically each major product line has it's own web site. This has generally worked well for us.

As I think everyone knows Google is giving preference to web sites that are responsive. Most of my web sites had not been redone for a long time. Actually our main site was created around 2002 using Microsoft Front Page. Our second most important web site was created about 2009 using DreamWeaver.

I started a a year ago to redo our web sites using WordPress. I wanted to work from the least important to the most important so I could learn as I went. The first one I did was one that I could close and not care about and the next two were done late last winter for two products that are not our main ones but still good product lines. The new sites look pretty good to me and seem to do a better job of presenting the products and supplying more info. I expected sales to go up for both products because of the new sites.

HOWEVER.

Sales for product 1 with the new site during the first season are down 80%
Sales for product 2 with it's new site are down about 55%

It makes me nervous about redoing our sites that are really important to us. Am I worrying about this unnecessarily?

[SumpinSpecial]

I suspect that the change has broken your SEO and Google has to re-index everything. Are they the sites linked in your sig?

BTW, unless you enjoy coding websites, why not migrate to a platform like Shopify? I launched my shop starting from nothing in two weeks on that platform, and no coding needed. (I have since tweaked things here and there.)

[turboguy]

Thanks Sharon,

No, the two linked in my signature are the two main ones I have not done yet and the ones I am starting to worry about redoing. The two that I redid are Home Page - Turbo Turf Straw Blowers (http://www.StrawBlowers.com) and Turbo Turf Watering Units | Turbo Turf watering units (http://www.WateringUnits.com). Our sales of Strawblowers are down 80% and watering units down 55%.

I don't have the old tracking numbers on wateringunits but traffic is down about 30% on Strawblowers.

[Harold Mansfield]

Nope you are not worrying unnecessarily and you should be very nervous and trying to find out what the problem is and correct it.
Using WordPress can be easy. That doesn't mean building a website that sells is easy.

I'd post it for review and get some feedback. If it's not the website, you at least want to cancel that out as a possibility as you're troubleshooting the issue.

[Harold Mansfield]

Thanks Sharon,

No, the two linked in my signature are the two main ones I have not done yet and the ones I am starting to worry about redoing. The two that I redid are Home Page - Turbo Turf Straw Blowers (http://www.StrawBlowers.com) and Turbo Turf Watering Units | Turbo Turf watering units (http://www.WateringUnits.com). Our sales of Strawblowers are down 80% and watering units down 55%.

I don't have the old tracking numbers on wateringunits but traffic is down about 30% on Strawblowers.
Kudos for posting them. I know it's hard to put your hard work in front of people to be picked apart.

I will say right away that the sites need some help. Better theme, better organization, better use of images, color, copy writing and calls to action.
It's all fixable and it shouldn't be too hard. You just need a little guidance.

[Fulcrum]

I looked at the straw blower site and, from my untrained eye, it appears to be very technical as opposed to trying to sell. I also have to ask, how many farms are still producing small bales? Around my area farms have switched to large bales and large cubes.

The biggest standout to me, is that there is no easy way to order directly off of the home page.

On a different note, and hopefully I'm not going too far OT, have you considered adapting the straw blower to work with hay? One right off the tractor as well as a stationary unit attached to a silo?

[turboguy]

Thanks for the very good and helpful comments. I will try and answer some of the questions and provide a little more detail. Brad, thanks for the good questions. The straw blowers we make are designed to be used more by a landscaper seeding a lawn to blow straw over the newly seeded lawn to hold moisture and protect the seed. They will blow either straw or hay but since hay has an application as feed for cattle and straw is more of a waste material and because hay can have undesirable seed in it they tend to use straw. Those types of bales used in are machine are still available and even home depot sells them. There are other machines that are used for agriculture that blow straw for bedding for cattle but that is not the market we cover and the machines need to be a little different. Also there is one brand of machine that blows the big round bales but those machines are $ 30,000 vs our 6K.

I will agree some of the jargon is technical but we are targeting landscape professionals who understand the terms. Just as someone experienced in saws may want to know the kerf where an average person might not know what a kerf is.

Harold, I tried to use a pretty simple theme for these two sites. The first on I did that I mentioned I didn't care about has a more deluxe theme with things flying in that way and sliding in this way and it almost seems more distracting then beneficial and I have noticed I have a really high bounce rate with that site. When I started that site back 15 years ago it was my attempt to give back to my industry. At the time Hydro Seeders were 95% of our business and there was nothing for people in that industry so I started that site and had anything that I thought might make a community such as a forum, free classified ads to sell equipment a chat room, lots of reference pages, free photos anyone could use to build a web site and more. After a few years discussions on the forum at that site led to the formation of the hydro seeding association which I was one of the founders and am still a director. Now the Association site has pretty much what I tried to do with that site so I neglected it for years and used that site as a gunny pig to learn WordPress. If anyone wants to see that site it is I-Hydroseeding | A hydro seeding help site for contractors and end users (http://www.i-hydroseeding.com) To me the deluxe theme makes it too busy so I tried to keep the first two sites I talked about in this thread simple and clean.

The world is always changing. Before I redid the straw blower site when I did a google search it came up number 1. Now the last time I looked I come up number 7. About the time I redid my site one of my competitors registered the name strawblower dot com which is pretty close to my strawblowers dot com. He is paying for traffic and now comes out number 1.

We have had some wild swings in sales before. The rental store market is a good one for the straw blowers and a few years ago I tried some print ads in a rental magazine and that year our business dropped to next to nothing as well. This year we are going back in the Rental Show in New Orleans for the first time to try and turn around sales. This is a declining market as well but still we should be selling a lot more than we are.

[Harold Mansfield]

Harold, I tried to use a pretty simple theme for these two sites. The first on I did that I mentioned I didn't care about has a more deluxe theme with things flying in that way and sliding in this way and it almost seems more distracting then beneficial and I have noticed I have a really high bounce rate with that site. When I started that site back 15 years ago it was my attempt to give back to my industry. At the time Hydro Seeders were 95% of our business and there was nothing for people in that industry so I started that site and had anything that I thought might make a community such as a forum, free classified ads to sell equipment a chat room, lots of reference pages, free photos anyone could use to build a web site and more. After a few years discussions on the forum at that site led to the formation of the hydro seeding association which I was one of the founders and am still a director. Now the Association site has pretty much what I tried to do with that site so I neglected it for years and used that site as a gunny pig to learn WordPress. If anyone wants to see that site it is I-Hydroseeding | A hydro seeding help site for contractors and end users (http://www.i-hydroseeding.com) To me the deluxe theme makes it too busy so I tried to keep the first two sites I talked about in this thread simple and clean.


Understandable about the sliders. Again, this is one of those areas where you need a little guidance. Just because a theme has a function doesn't mean you have to use it. Most sliders have controls that allow you to speed things up, slow them down, fade and so on. Sliders are not always the way to go though. You are also not limited to only what the theme offers.

A good consultant will ask questions about your business, what you want to accomplish, your demographic and look at competitors and suggest ways to layout your site so that it presents well on the web, appeals to your market, makes it easy for them to find information and do business with you. This is not something you can intuitively know or learn quickly. When you're doing it yourself and learning along the way, your focus is getting stuff on the page, not design, marketing, and sales. Someone experienced can look at all factors simultaneously and aren't constrained by trying to learn as they go.

Again, this is a really easy thing to correct. Either talk to someone and listen if you want to do it yourself, or hire someone to just do it and move on to your other marketing.

[turboguy]

They are different sites than the ones listed on my signature and are listed earlier in this thread. Traffic does seem to have improved a bit since my original post but still not up to where it was. I am sure since the page urls for all but the home page changed it could have affected things. One other factor that could have affected the updated site that I am more concerned with of those two is that I have more competition on the main search term. The item we sell on that site is strawblowers and I have the URL strawblowers.com which always helped with search results. One of my main competitors recently took the URL strawblower.com so that too could have had some impact. Traffic is still down but now only about 25%. Unit sales were down by nearly half for the full year but have been that low before. It is a product that has one of our highest margins (close to 70%) but a product with low sales so I am going to be pushing sales for that product in other ways this year. I am shooting for an 800% increase in sales this year but not planning on much of that originating with the web site.

Thanks for the suggestion of Shopify. I will look at it but it has never been something I thought fit us but I will take a hard look at it. I am just ready to start redoing our main web site that generates close to a couple of million in sales. I will look at Shopify but at this time I am leaning more to either using WordPress or using a bootstrap theme and personalizing it with Dreamweaver. It is going to be a fairly complex site which will take me a couple of months to compete. If I do use WordPress I will have to either find a host with a staging area or download WordPress and the files and programs needed to run it on my computer until it is finished where if I go with Dreamweaver and a bootstrap responsive theme I can just build it easier.

I probably mentioned this before but the main site that generates most of our business was created in 2002 using FrontPage and has not been changed much since that time other than updating unit prices and model changes. So I am really long overdue on an update. The main site is the first one in my signature.

[mscuasay]

If you will be developing in Wordpress, I suggest looking into DesktopServer (https://serverpress.com) which allows you to host the WP site locally while you develop. You can maintain however many versions you need. You can deploy straight from your local to production when you're ready. It does work with Dreamweaver but I have not tried that feature. If you can, build out the full site with the same URLs as before. Deploy to staging once the new site is a complete mirror of the old such as the metadata. Run an SEO audit on the staging site to catch errors and make corrections before going into live production. Fix and improve. Test on staging again.

Perhaps, you can install WP as a subdomain or a completely new domain for use as a test/staging area. Specify in your robots.txt file to not crawl through it. Set a site or directory password to limit access.

Google will be changing their search algorithm (http://blog.altaircontent.com/get-up-to-speed-before-googles-update/) this July. Google says that the change won't affect a lot of sites only the slowest. However, any change is bound to affect page ranking in some manner.

Just some ideas I hope may help.

[HumaneHosting]

If you will be developing in Wordpress, I suggest looking into DesktopServer (https://serverpress.com) which allows you to host the WP site locally while you develop. You can maintain however many versions you need. You can deploy straight from your local to production when you're ready. It does work with Dreamweaver but I have not tried that feature. If you can, build out the full site with the same URLs as before. Deploy to staging once the new site is a complete mirror of the old such as the metadata. Run an SEO audit on the staging site to catch errors and make corrections before going into live production. Fix and improve. Test on staging again.

Perhaps, you can install WP as a subdomain or a completely new domain for use as a test/staging area. Specify in your robots.txt file to not crawl through it. Set a site or directory password to limit access.

Google will be changing their search algorithm (http://blog.altaircontent.com/get-up-to-speed-before-googles-update/) this July. Google says that the change won't affect a lot of sites only the slowest. However, any change is bound to affect page ranking in some manner.

Just some ideas I hope may help.

Personally I prefer the subdomain to "production domain" method. As it verifies that your test website will act similar to your live version given that they would be in similar conditions.

As most providers allow you to create at least one subdomain in addition to your main domain this shouldn't occur any additional expenses. Unless your "production" website is almost at "full tilt" and/or your test website still need to "idle" some server resources.

[CenterStageSocial]

updating your site shouldn't have negative effects on traffic at all. In fact it should be quite the opposite. BUT.... if the majority of your business is repeat customers we often find that the change in topography can create a bit of churn. 80% though? Any other insights you can add to this?

[PolarBearBob]

:rolleyes:Mr. Badger

With all due respect, a 3:46 minute video, I'm in an industry of mechanical marvels and machines as are you. People, especially newer brands of people simply don't have the attention span for something that long. I'd get your product video down to 30-40 seconds and have it play as soon as the home page comes up. The static shots of the internals can be added to text regarding the quality of it's construction. As a potential customer I'd want to see it starting, loading the straw, shooting the straw and the distance it can deliver it. In your text are things like motor spec's, fuel capacity, run time, maintenance required, parts availability, dry weight etc...

I want to see and hear that machine working immediately, loop your video clip so your customer doesn't have to button anything until they are ready to buy it. I'd go a step further and post your base price, people want to know what something costs and they want to know it now! That's my two cents worth, from an old photo/video guy. FYI, a video shot with a High Def camera rather than a cell phone is a far more appealing image (use a tripod). Also an under-bed of audio "Calling to Action" message while the video is playing wouldn't be a bad idea either.

For what it's worth.
PolarBearBob

[Harold Mansfield]

updating your site shouldn't have negative effects on traffic at all. In fact it should be quite the opposite.

Actually, if you're changing copy, page titles, SEO, and taking away or adding new pages and URLs it certainly will have an affect on your traffic. New copy gets re indexed, removed pages fall by the wayside taking any traffic with them, and possibly creating 404 errors for the old links that haven't fallen off or redirected.

The good news is that the new content does get indexed and if the changes have been for the better you should improve upon things. Not merely stay the same.

If all you're doing is updating copy on existing pages, it should''t have much negative affect at all. Not sure of the percentage, but as long as you're not changing MOST of the copy to completely different copy, you should be fine.


:rolleyes:Mr. Badger

With all due respect, a 3:46 minute video, I'm in an industry of mechanical marvels and machines as are you. People, especially newer brands of people simply don't have the attention span for something that long. I'd get your product video down to 30-40 seconds and have it play as soon as the home page comes up.


I agree that is too long for a video that's supposed to get to the point. I disagree with auto play. People hate that and back out of sites that have sound coming from them and some browsers are now blocking auto play videos altogether.

[PolarBearBob]

:rolleyes:Mr. Badger

With all due respect, a 3:46 minute video, I'm in an industry of mechanical marvels and machines as are you. People, especially newer brands of people simply don't have the attention span for something that long. I'd get your product video down to 30-40 seconds and have it play as soon as the home page comes up. The static shots of the internals can be added to text regarding the quality of it's construction. As a potential customer I'd want to see it starting, loading the straw, shooting the straw and the distance it can deliver it. In your text are things like motor spec's, fuel capacity, run time, maintenance required, parts availability, dry weight etc...

I want to see and hear that machine working immediately, loop your video clip so your customer doesn't have to button anything until they are ready to buy it. I'd go a step further and post your base price, people want to know what something costs and they want to know it now! That's my two cents worth, from an old photo/video guy. FYI, a video shot with a High Def camera rather than a cell phone is a far more appealing image (use a tripod). Also an under-bed of audio "Calling to Action" message while the video is playing wouldn't be a bad idea either.

For what it's worth.
PolarBearBob

[Skydog]

If your traffic hasn't fallen, but sales are down, it might be a problem with the new designs. You might want to start doing some conversion rate optimization for your site. If you have a Google Analytics account, try seeing where your customers are leaving your website from. From there you can start coming up with ideas about why they're leaving, and what you can change to boost conversions.

Although thats easier said than done! There's alot to conversion rate optimization, but heres a link to a Moz article that gives a good overview - https://moz.com/learn/seo/conversion-rate-optimization

[gimli]

Well a simple way to look at this is through two free tools. First i would go to webmaster console and look at my link profile and see if everything did indeed move. You should use something to track links too like linkody for example.
I would go and look and the indexing of my site to ee if pages where taken down or and re indexed , it may be that some of your inner content hasnt indexed and thus the main pages suffer.
I would look at my sitemaps and see if everything is good there and robot tags sometimes WordPress blocks stuff out.
Look at your crawl issues page for 404s and so forth
Look at the mobile usability to see if there are any registered mobile faults.
Then look at your search console's user search graphics look for a drop in ave ranking and keywords ( lower ranking would mean less sales)
Look at your click through ratio did it drop ? did you change the search snippet when moving sites ?

I would then move to analytics and look at behaviour user flow to see if any blockages are occurring ( pages with high bounce rates ).

Was your old site properly de indexed ? it migh look like a duplicate content to google ... speaking of are your canonical tags set on WordPress?

Another think did you change host whilst doing this ? hosting environments have alot of impact in serps like their time to first byte. Down times prevent bot crawls.

I want to ask how long this has been occurring usually during a migration you will lose ome ranking but regain ot of it it is normal as google has to re figure the site. Sometimes you get sand boxed for certain keywords because in googles eyes 'why the change we dont trust this yet "

It may be that worpress has changed you site structure somewhat , where you internal links flow to the h1 tags and h2 tags ( if you have used a website template i find most of them are really bad for seo ).

It could be that you content is simply not good on those pages , you could be losing to new competition or old competition that has upped their selling game .

You will have to run through all of this piece by piece abd test it will be a long process moving a website is an awful thing, but at any rate you would be even worse off had you stayed non responsive.

[turboguy]

Thanks for the good suggestions gimli. I will follow up on those. I have looked at the behavior in analytics and may adjust a few things on the site based on that. I did change both the hosting company and most of the page titles which could throw things off for a while but should recover in time. Traffic is improving but still not up to where it was. Sales are also improving but I am doing other things that affect the sales. We just had that product in a major trade show that I had not displayed at in nearly a decade and plan to start a magazine ad campaign. Sales are already to about the total for all of last year but about half of that came from the trade show.

Skydog, thanks for the link. I will check that out and see if I can make some changes.

Having a shorter video and using that with an autoplay in the top of the home page in place of the slider might be a good option. With the current video they have to want to watch it but the length is actually a little shorter than most all of the competitors videos and if someone is thinking about spending $ 6-7,000.00 they probably want at least the info and data that the 3.46 minute video contains. A second, short video might be a good option. The most popular video I have on you tube has 63,000 views and runs 12.27 minutes. It is actually an instructional video (operating and maintenance guide) that when I posted it I really expected few people to watch.

My concern when I first posted my question was that I was planning to redo my main web site. That too will involve a change of hosting companies and many re-titled pages. Well I had hoped to start on that months ago but I am expecting tomorrow to be the day when I finally start. The main website generates about a million and a half in business. If it happens to fall off the face of Googles map it would be a big deal. The Straw Blower site is a small part of our business so whatever it does isn't a major thing. My concern was that if I redo the main site and we have a big drop off that would hurt. One way or the other it really needs to be done and I do think if you have good content sooner or later it will pay off and I do expect the content to be better than the site we have now.

[jeffscott]

If you have a tracking tool for your websites (Google Analytics) it will be easy to monitor the changes done on the website/s or Search Console to be particular with.

[turboguy]

It's been quite some time since I posted this question so I thought I would do an update.

For those that don't recall what my question was and to save everyone from going back to page 1 to look. I had updated one of my web sites from one I had created inreamweaver to one I created in WordPress. The new site was responsive where the old one wasn't and I felt it looked better, coveyed my message better and had better graphics. However after the change my traffic dropped about 40% Sales also fell by about 70%. My concern was that I wanted to redo my main website which is really important to me but because of the drop in traffic it made me afraid to use WordPress.

I decided some time ago that I had nothing to lose. Our traffic on the main site was dropping constantly. Way back we used to come out really great on Google. I would have several links right at the top. Now the only way I come out on Google is if they search for my company by name. I came out well on Bing but Bing is not too important. Our traffic used to be around 6K a month and was down now to 2K

So here is the update. The site that I did last year seems to be doing better now. Traffic is up about 40-50% over the old site and sales have recovered but I did do a major trade show and a print ad campaign for that product as well. It seems that it just needed more time.

I have been working on updating my main site using WordPress for the last 3 months or more. If that sounds like a long time it does run about 65 pages right now and I have another 10 or so to add when I have more time. The biggest part of the time was working in PhotoShop. Anyway for better or worse my new TurboTurf site went live this afternoon. I still have things to do such as making it secure which I will be doing soon and adding the pages I talked about. I also have some fine tuning to do on the menu and footer and other things but that is my update.

[Vedigitize]

Feeling nervous is one of the many wonderful experiences we humans enjoy.
Heart pounding? Forehead beading? Praying that you’ll fall down a manhole and the king of the sewer rats will make you his butler if only you can avoid the thing you’re nervous about?
Selling your product to shops involves doing a lot of things you probably haven’t done before. Sending pitch emails, meeting a retailer to talk about your work, ringing a shop to find out how your items are selling, exhibiting at your first trade show.
https://www.small-business-forum.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=1012&stc=1

[journalist55]

:rolleyes:Mr. Badger

With all due respect, a 3:46 minute video, I'm in an industry of mechanical marvels and machines as are you. People, especially newer brands of people simply don't have the attention span for something that long. I'd get your product video down to 30-40 seconds and have it play as soon as the home page comes up. The static shots of the internals can be added to text regarding the quality of it's construction. As a potential customer I'd want to see it starting, loading the straw, shooting the straw and the distance it can deliver it. In your text are things like motor spec's, fuel capacity, run time, maintenance required, parts availability, dry weight etc...

I want to see and hear that machine working immediately, loop your video clip so your customer doesn't have to button anything until they are ready to buy it. I'd go a step further and post your base price, people want to know what something costs and they want to know it now! That's my two cents worth, from an old photo/video guy. FYI, a video shot with a High Def camera rather than a cell phone is a far more appealing image (use a tripod). Also an under-bed of audio "Calling to Action" message while the video is playing wouldn't be a bad idea either.

For what it's worth.
PolarBearBob

Especially today with social media platforms showing 10 second videos and GIFs for advertisements, a new customer is not going to stay for a video that long, maybe only a returning customer would.

[turboguy]

Thanks for your helpful comment journalist. I will agree that in many places a short video is the best way to go but I think there is a need in some cases for a longer video. I have short videos imbedded on my web site. There are times a longer video is the way to go. For instance, if you wanted to teach someone how to create a website with WordPress a short video isn't going to cut it. The YouTube video I have with the most views and that has created the most sales is one that wasn't even designed to create sales. It's an instructional video on how to operate our machines. That one has 99,000 view compared to the 12,000 - 20,000 for our sales videos.

I haven't done an update on this topic since 2018 when I was just taking the new site online. It was worked out well. I mentioned in my last update we were selling about a million and a half of our main product. Now it is double that and if we could produce faster we could easily sell another million or two. We are coming up on page one and sometimes in position 1 for many searches. It does have a lot of information, runs about 80 pages, prices are listed and they can order online. We don't do adwords or any paid advertising for the site.

The strawblower site which was the first that I redid has been running steady but no much of an increase. When I have more time I am going to do some changes on the site. Basically just to change the WordPress theme. I believe their is an issue with the menu when viewed on a phone and that this could be hurting our SEO.


Thanks for all the helpful comments. I appreciate those.