You launch a new website for your business, one that is a much stronger representation of your brand than your existing site and is designed to attract your target customers–and generate more sales. As the minutes, then hours, then days, tick by following the launch, you eagerly watch your Google Analytics data for signs of an uptick in traffic and conversions. Instead, you see signs of a significant organic search traffic drop coinciding with the site launch–and keyword rankings and page positions in search results also begin to decline.
Panic starts to set in. What happened?
This is probably not a situation you want to be in. The successful launch of a new website is not as easy as the simple flip of a switch. SEO is tricky business–one wrong move and disaster can strike. Take the time before the launch (and during and after the launch) to make sure you avoid a drop in organic search traffic and rankings. As you have likely learned, it takes significant time and effort to achieve strong search rankings–and unfortunately only minutes for that success to disappear.
Don’t take a gamble with your site’s organic search performance. Never launch a site without ensuring you’ve considered and addressed the following:
There’s another kind of accessibility that you need to consider: It is also a major problem if your users cannot access the site on their device or find the site too difficult or annoying to navigate.
Let’s start with the search engines. First, make sure that the robots.txt file on your site is not currently blocking access to search engines. The robots.txt file is created to instruct search engine robots on how to crawl your site.  Your site developer should be able to test this, but if not, you can check this quickly using the robots.txt tester tool through Google Search Console. Second, create and submit an XML sitemap. If you are using WordPress, you can easily create an XML sitemap through an SEO plugin like All in One SEO. Once you’ve created your sitemap, you can submit it in Google Search Console. This will prompt Google to crawl and index your site pages. If you notice that, following a crawl, Google has indexed very few–or none–of your site’s total pages, consider this a red flag to discuss with your developer. Something is likely keeping Google from accessing those pages.
Next, let’s discuss accessibility for users. In addition to ensuring that your site pages and content are accessible by search engines, Rand Fishkin of Moz suggests asking yourself other accessibility-related questions, including:
Speed coincides with accessibility. A slow-to-load website might as well be inaccessible, because most users won’t be waiting around for it to load. Google recommends a page load time of no more than 2-3 seconds, as it has been shown that most users will abandon a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Google offers specific PageSpeed rules and recommendations in their Web Fundamentals resources for web developers.
What is the most common culprit of poor website speed? Often it is the use of too many large images that have not been compressed. These visuals might look stunning on the site, but this doesn’t really matter if the page won’t load. Make sure images have been compressed as much as possible without hindering their appearance to ensure the fastest load time. If your site is using a full width image, a good size range is between 1400 and 1600 pixels–still large enough for high quality across most HD screens but not too large to compromise the site load time.
Of course, image size is not the only concern. There’s also the improper use of javascript, server errors, and other issues to consider. Google offers PageSpeed Insights for your site to test for speed on mobile and desktop devices and provide a list of recommendations based on your scores. Test your site for speed–and make any necessary optimizations–prior to launch to ensure your site traffic won’t be negatively impacted by poor speed scores.
Think of the external links that currently point to your existing website. You don’t want to lose this valuable link equity when you launch a new site. More so, you don’t want a user to click on a link to your site, either on another site or in search results, and be greeted with a 404 Page Not Found error message. Before launching your new site, create a page-by-page link redirection document, mapping every page on your old site to a page on your new site. This will help you easily set permanent 301 redirects for your old site URLS. Make sure to find the page on your new site that most closely matches the page on the old site to give users the best possible experience.
On another note, don’t forget to set a redirect of the non-www version of your site to the www version. Likewise, if you’ve installed an SSL, make sure the HTTP version of your site redirects to the HTTPS version.
If you have failed to do any keyword research prior to your site launch, you cannot consider your site content optimized for search. There are many resources for keyword research, but here are some simple steps to get started:
After you have identified your target keywords, use them to complete the following pre-launch tasks on your website:
Before you launch your site, make sure the Google Analytics code is properly installed on the site and test that data is capturing. Also utilize Google Tag Manager to manage conversion tracking on your website around specific triggers, like page visits, contact form submissions, or e-commerce transactions.
You do not want gaps in your data or a loss of analytics information immediately following the launch. Also make a note in Google Analytics of the site launch date so you can easily reference it going forward and use it as a benchmark.
The work doesn’t end after the site is launched. Continue to watch your data and traffic closely to look for any red flags that may indicate a problem. This could include:
This is a comprehensive, but not exhaustive, list of site launch considerations. For help with your upcoming site launch or assistance addressing SEO concerns following a recent site launch, please contact the team at Company 119.
