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Forget SearchMetrics.

Did you see an actual drop in website traffic?

Of course SearchMetrics will show a drop. It will be awhile until they find all the new URLs. SearchMetrics though has nothing to do with your actual traffic or rankings. It is just an estimate.

The hubub surrounding moving a site to all HTPPS is overblown and, in most cases, completely unnecessary. Just because Google announces something as one of 200 ranking factors does not mean that you need to change your whole structure to accommodate them. If it is a factor at all (Google has been known to lie), it is certainly not one that seems to make much of a positive difference.

Based upon both mine and a major eCommerce course that I am affiliated with's limited experimentation with this, our preliminary tests show that any website with backlinks is going to see a drop because those links are now having to go through 301 re-directs to a new URL. You are going to lose about a third of a link's value for at least several months when it is being re-directed to another URL. Even with sites that had no backlinks, we saw zero evidence that moving it to all HTTPS did anything to help rankings and, in fact, seemed to hurt the rankings (perhaps because internal links were being re-directed).

For sure, eCommerce sites need to have their ordering pages as HTTPS. The whole website? Hardly! I'd strongly advise against moving a site to all HTTPS unless you have a very good reason for doing so (i.e. you are collecting sensitive data from people on every page).

For all of your links that you control, you should change them to point directly to the new URLs. Don't let them redirect through the 301. Contact webmasters on other sites where you have links and get as many of them changed as you can.

Also, and this is one where most people screw up, make sure all of your internal links are updated to the new URLs and not going through the redirect.

It should be OK after a few days/ weeks. According to me, you shouldn't worry about this!

Personally I wouldn't do any of the main suggestions in this thread until I went over the rank history for various keywords. i'd want to know precisely the serps most being affected. hopefully you have been tracking keyword ranks etc.

If you have that data at one of the links you gave forgive me but all I saw was a general visibility chart not broken down by actual keywords.

the thing is you made two changes at once - Https and a cart. Magento is decent with SEO but also has some plugins and tweaks you can make it better with (its fresh in my mind because we wrote an article on magento SEO a couple months back). Almost always a change like that (depending on what you are coming from) makes various changes that by themselves can affect SEO).

This does give me some pause.

"- changed shopping cart to magento - url format has changed - we have redirected all urls"

What does that mean? As I think one other poster mentioned you don't want to get too redirect crazy that you don't manually change your internal navigation and just do redirects.

I knew of one company that we had to stop in their tracks because thats what they wanted to do.

But again the number one thing I would do if you ave any historical rank tracking information is pinpoint where the most visibility is being lost. In many situations having that points directly to the problem and the links or on page changes affected. I agree with you - I doubt its just the https.

I would not tell everyone to change their links pointing at the site or switch back and forth until I knew where the lost was taking place in terms of keywords

Somewhere, here in the forum, I did a long post on https.

People were falling all over it, calling it the next best thing because google upchucked something about it.

I warned people to have a complete version in http. Some people can't make a secure connection each and every time, especially noted on smartphones.

If you have images or other elements only in https, they may not load in http. People may get a warning and surf away. This is especially frustrating, as I found out, when redoing a church website. Macs for some reason had a problem as well getting pdfs, even though they were getting a secured connection and all was available as such. I had to literally change links on all pages just to make sure.

Any good server that you switch or create from scratch with, should actually create the whole site under both. After that, however, it could be up to you to do a link that works on both. Images were not loading either in the above case.

That iffy secure connection can be a pain in the a$$.
(If you have a sat dish, you probably know you can't get HD all the time)
Servers and connections vomit all the time, slamming the door on an uninformed visitor.

That is only one problem.

The main other problem would be page speed. The page speed could suffer. So anyone who claims nonsense about page speed, then touts https, is more than all wet. It could be a contradiction in the real world. Your https could slow your site way down.

If you do not need people to login, no apparent reason for https. But people fall on this because google burped something mundane about it.

Now that's only 2. There are several other problems with switching to https.

Paul

It looks like OP is collecting sensitive data, at least physical address, phone, email, name, etc... so my advice is stick with the https.

These things you need to check , your apache config , your magento .htaccess , and your magento settings , sometimes even if you set it to ssl it will go to http:// , so to force this you must go to system / configration / web/ and set https to unsecure link aswel.

and try to get better caching because your website is so slow.