Why Do Rankings Drop After a Website Launch?
A drop in keyword rankings can make your stomach drop, too. It’s painful to invest in a new website, polishing the appropriate keywords to perfection, only to watch your rankings for those keywords go down. Why would your ranking drop when your new website is better? What if the drop in rankings is the result of an inferior website? What if the rankings never go up? Fortunately, there’s no reason to panic. Your experience is normal. Launching a new website only puts keyword rankings in temporary peril as search engines re-crawl and reassess the site—as long as you take care of any technical problems. Differences in site structure and content can make a big impact, too.
Technical Issues Are Often to Blame
A drop in keyword rankings after a site launch is often caused by technical issues. All of them are fairly easy fixes if you know how to do it:
- Broken links: If somebody clicks on a link that doesn’t work, they’ll never click it again—even if you fix it. It also gives the impression that your business isn’t very professional.
- Site speed decrease: Today’s internet users are extremely impatient. They won’t sit around for an entire 10 seconds while a page loads.
- Non-functional redirects: Redirects can ease the burden of dealing with broken links by directing around them to send users to the correct page, but that’s only if they work.
- Reduction in mobile-friendliness: Visit your site on your phone to see how well it functions. If loading takes longer than three seconds on mobile, start there—after just a few seconds, the majority of visitors bounce. Explore your site in depth to avoid missing anything.
- Incomplete indexing: Make sure all pages are indexed.
Preserve High-Quality Content
Your old website’s rankings in organic search were a result of its unique content and layout, so it’s only natural that the rankings would change when the website does. One way to reduce this issue is to be careful to keep common threads between your old website and your new one. Your most popular keyword-heavy content should be transferred to your new site. Any page that attracts a lot of visitors should be transferred over – there’s no reason to sacrifice the content that’s proven itself when it comes to driving traffic. Keeping page structures and headings similar is also helpful. However, despite the benefits of keeping many things similar, new content is also critical. A new website with all the same text isn’t really very new – customers will be disappointed to discover that, despite the new look, there’s nothing to find that they haven’t seen already. Balance is key: Fresh content for a fresh site, when combined with minor tweaks to already-successful content, are a strong combination.
SEO Fixes Take Time
Even if you perfect your web marketing, keyword ranking will be impacted when you launch a new site. Though search engines might seem magical, the algorithms behind them still take time to complete tasks. If luck is on your side, search engines will identify and analyse the changes in about 2-4 weeks, though sometimes it takes a bit longer. Monitor changes in rankings and traffic once a week to avoid needless stress. Day-to-day keyword ranking changes are natural and shouldn’t be acted upon in real time. Only when you have enough data to establish a pattern should you make additional changes. Make the best use of that time by posting excellent content on a regular basis, which will also help speed up your rankings recovery. Most drops after a site launch are short-lived as long as you make sure to address problems wisely. Though you can fix these problems yourself, many small business owners trust web marketing experts to manage keywords. It’s a smart way to free up time for the things only you can do.
