Priority: Relaunch Your Website Without Killing SEO
Redesigning your website is an exciting time however don’t fall into the trap of forgetting about your existing SEO ranking. After all, if your customer can’t find your new site, you will be sitting pretty on page 3. Learn how to get smart about your impending launch with this expert advice.
Okay what happens to your search rankings when you get a new website? Now that’s a question we get asked a lot. Often times far too late in the piece. So how does it work? Well you get a new website, you launch it, it looks great, you submit it to Google and when you submit it to Google, Google come and re-index it all and try to work out what’s changed and or how different is it.
Now, what you need to do or what you should do is tell Google it’s a new website and tell Google that this page that previously existed is now this page over here. That’s important because what Google is trying to do is say okay, well if there’s a completely new page and it has a completely new web address then I have to assume that this one is no longer there. So, let’s just lose the rankings altogether! That can be disastrous as you can imagine. What you want to be saying to Google is this page that existed before is now this page, so any value that was put on that for search ranking should be transferred. Now, the one question I do get is – ‘can you guarantee that the rankings I’ve currently got will stay on the new site’? The short answer is no, because this is still up to Google. There are however a lot and a lot of things you can do you can do.
These things will make sure that Google sees that this message before, is this message now. If you do it well and you do it thoroughly enough, most times you can get across without any issue whatsoever. Now if you have rankings out there at the moment that are really driving traffic and that you think are really contributing to your bottom line and if you’re about to launch your new website, you need to do something about it and you need to do early so you can consider what needs to change and what steps you need to take to ensure that you can hold on to those rankings. If you can maintain those rankings this will go a long way to maintaining your bottom line.
