A goal of almost every website owner in the world is more traffic. “If I’m making $100/day with 1,000 visitors, then if I double my traffic I’ll double my revenue!“
It’s not always that easy.
Getting more traffic on your site isn’t a bad thing, but rather than getting more traffic you should work on getting better traffic.
A few years ago we rebuilt a website for a client and consolidated it quite a bit. After the launch, traffic dropped considerably but leads and revenue from the website rose — which was exactly the plan. Instead of working to attract more people, we worked to attract the right people.
Higher numbers in your Google Analytics aren’t a bad thing, and I love “up and to the right” as much as anyone, but just be sure your traffic is going up for the right reasons.
Mickey, even though it hasn’t happened yet, this is an issue I do worry about — doing a redesign/rewrite of a client’s old site, which then loses ranking and/or traffic. I even warn about that possibility in the small print of my proposals.
Jenny has also talked about fewer-but-better visitors, but I can easily see clients reacting to such promises with a healthy dose of doubt, if not a loss of trust.
Most online advice says to change the text as little as possible, but to me a new design with the same old copy is pointless. I do try to keep the same keywords, but maybe move them to the H2, so the H1 can be a marketing line.
With designers doing redesigns every day, it’s an issue that I think deserves far more coverage than it gets. Would love to hear more of your thoughts about it, either in an email or in future posts. Thanks!
Great insights, Tom! I’d challenge on one point — don’t put that possibility in the small print of your proposals, but make huge and obvious. Talk about it with them, and explain what’s coming.
In almost every redesign, whether it’s content only or a brand new site, traffic will go down. You’ll get a surge the day of launch from the client and social shares, and then it’ll usually drop to pre-redesign levels as Google gets things sorted out.
In the coming days and weeks after that, traffic will rise and then we’ll see what the new work did. In most cases, rising higher than the previous level is good, but it’s all about goals at that point.
I agree that unpacking this idea a bit more could be fun…