Help! I just launched a new website and my search rankings tanked!

  • October 4, 2023
  • SEO

Imagine this nightmare scenario: you’re on the verge of launching your newly redesigned website, and you’re already anticipating new leads and returning customers. You’ve spent countless hours working through every last detail before even considering unveiling your new creation to the world. The big day arrives, and you give the green light to launch.

Suddenly, you realize you forgot to plan for one crucial element: the SEO best practices that you had so carefully incorporated into your old website.

Unfortunately, this is not just a nightmare that can be forgotten once you’ve had your morning coffee, but something I’ve seen happen to countless small businesses over my 10 years as the owner of an SEO and online marketing agency.

Your redesigned website was meant to give your business a new lease on life, but instead, you’ve destroyed your organic search rankings and traffic overnight. When you change your site without thoroughly thinking through the SEO implications, you might do something harmful like throw away substantive content or change every page’s URL without making sure to redirect the old ones.

Luckily, you can easily avoid this frightening scenario altogether by planning ahead and learning from the mistakes illustrated in the examples below.

Mistake #1: You added Flash-based or unoptimized images

So, you added a number of big and eye-catching images to your new landing pages in the hopes of making your site visually appealing. Or maybe you moved to a more visual, but less SEO-friendly Flash design.

Don’t make the mistake of forgetting to optimize the new images, or else the pages on your new site may load so slowly that potential customers exit before viewing any of the content. Relying on Flash elements also can cause huge problems for SEO and will actually prohibit many mobile users from viewing the site.

In the land of online commerce, patience is not a virtue — today’s savvy customers are more impatient waiting for pages to load. According to Radware, customers will abandon a page within three seconds if it hasn’t loaded.

Consider an example from the publishing world. The Financial Times, while working on a new version of its site, ran an experiment to understand how speed impacted user engagement — specifically, the number of articles read by visitors, which is one of the primary ways they measure their success. They then used this data to calculate the impact on their revenue.

What they found was that the speed of their site greatly affected their revenue streams, from many hundreds of thousands of dollars in the short term to millions in the long term.

(Article Excerpt and Image from Search Engine Land).  See more

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