By Kirby Mack, Vice President of Digital Media at Simplicity Lone Beacon
Knowledge is great. I love learning new things. But sometimes we can take for granted the things we have learned, and just expect others to know it. I know I’m guilty of that, and it’s something I am trying to overcome. Thus, this week’s article.
Let’s pretend you’ve just spent months going back and forth with a developer. Revision after revision, test after test, and now it’s time to launch. Your brand new website is ready to be presented to the world. You pull the trigger and boom… nothing happens. It’s a ghost town. I mean you have a new, beautiful top-of-the-line website, but where is all the traffic? Where is all the fanfare? And worse yet, why has my traffic actually lowered?
You weren’t expecting that. Well, what should you expect?
What happens to a website and its digital fingerprint when we launch a new version?
To put it simply: It dips.
How much it dips, all depends on how much we change the structure of your previous website.
When Simplicity Lone Beacon launches a site, we do so with protocols and barriers already in place to help block “bad bots” and false traffic, i.e.; all of those AI crawlers, overseas traffic farms, DDoS hack attempts, and more. We attempt to block all that stuff. If your previous website was receiving a lot of traffic from any of those sources in the past, you will most certainly see a drop in organic traffic. Sure, high numbers are fun. But isn’t it more about the quality of the traffic vs the quantity? Oftentimes when we dig deep into the analytics, we find that the numbers lost were mostly from traffic outside of your practicing area. And in some cases, outside of your practicing country. What good does it do Pete, if his Pittsburg Pizzeria gets hundreds of visits to his site from Arizona?
However, because of the certain elements and rules we utilize to cut down on all the above sources, this may be unique to a Simplicity Lone Beacon site launch. So let’s get a little broader in scope and look at it from an industry standard. After the initial rush of “I want to see the new site!” traffic, you will still almost certainly see a dip in numbers. And as typical with SEO, it can take between 4-6 weeks to level out. But don’t be disheartened, it can certainly take less time.
Here are the main reasons and things to consider:
New Sitemap and Recrawling: With a brand-new site comes a brand-new site map. And with that sitemap comes recrawling. This is how Google keeps track of websites and ranks them for SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Think of this as the Dewey Decimal System at your local library. When you launch a new site, Google must recrawl your new site and reindex all of your pages, new and old. It’s also analyzing your new site’s content to establish trust and score your website. Not only that, but it must find the pages that no longer exist and ensure it “de-indexes” them.
Content Change: New site, new pages, new content. It’s a package deal. This means Google must now take note of all these changes and consider their ranking factor and relevance to the topics that you are targeting. The restructuring of your content plays a huge role.
New URL Structure: A new site launch is the perfect time to update your links to follow a more consistent structure and make them more SEO-friendly. URLs should easily tell users where they are on your site and what they’re viewing. When we change URLs, this becomes new data for Google to find and then store. Google must again establish trust and credibility within the whole site.
Because of these elements, especially when combined, Google looks at your website as a brand-new website, regardless of how established your brand is. And therefore, Google cannot and will not rank it or push it like the previous version. At least until it has a good understanding of your new site. Again, it can take 4-6 weeks to rebound. During this time, Google crawlers are doing their job and looking into all the updates mentioned — and more. They are inspecting your website and its content with a magnifying glass and with Google’s new SEO algorithm. If Google deems your content unhelpful, it will ignore it. Lucky for you, we have a very impressive content-writing team.
In the end, it’s very common for not just our clients but for all new websites to take a dip in the first month. (How many companies will admit that?) Then month-over-month your website will likely increase in organic traffic, engagements, and in our case, the number of leads.
“O.K. Kirby, but now we are into month three and I am still not seeing my organic traffic numbers return.”
If this is the case, we should then consider these possible scenarios and begin to troubleshoot.
- Redirects. Are they in place? Remember we changed your link structure and even removed some older pages. We want to make sure that any old page has a redirect set up, so no matter what link a visitor clicks, they land on your website and not a broken link.
- Page load speed. Is it critically slow? Google hates slow.
- Issues with Google Analytics code implementation. Evaluate and audit your Google setup.
- Sitemap. Was the new sitemap submitted to Google and/or crawled? Have you requested that Google dump your old website cache from their database?
- Lack of SEO. Do you have any? Is it good? Do you even have a sitemap? What about a robots.txt file? Even worse, I have seen some people launch a new website and not remove the rule that was put into place to hide the site from search engines while in development. Oftentimes, people will forget to remove that rule therefore still not allowing a search engine to see the site.
- Social Media. Are you utilizing it? Is it linked to your site? Oddly enough Google considers social media to play a big role in your SEO.
These are just a few of the many things to consider after a new site launch. So don’t be discouraged, if your new website is truly a better version of your older website, you have nothing to worry about and before you know it, everything will work out in the end.
