Website Redesign SEO: Why Your Organic Traffic May Drop
Website Redesign SEO: Why Your Organic Traffic May Drop
Does this sound like you? You’ve updated your website content with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. Created a better user-experience. And designed a space that truly reflects your brand. Now you have a shiny, ✨brand new✨ website making its debut into the real world. You’re ready to start seeing that rise in organic traffic, but you open up your analytics and you see the complete opposite. Your organic traffic has fallen into the depths.
We’ve launched various websites over our 25 years as a website design and full scale digital agency. We’ve rode the waves of organic traffic with our clients (with success), and we’re here to tell you that your traffic will recover. When you launch a new site, Google does various things to update itself. So the extent of your site changes is going to play a role.
Here are how some of the common updates you make to your new website can play a role in how you show up on search engine result pages (SERPs):
First Things First – Recrawling
Before we jump in, it’s important to understand website crawling. This is how Google keeps track of websites and ranks them for SERPs. The common way to think of this process is as spiders that crawl throughout your website pages and store its content. These spiders move from link to link and evaluate what they find. When you launch a new site, Google has to recrawl your site and reindex your pages. It’s also analyzing your new site’s content to establish trust and score your website. This can take some time and is one of the reasons why your organic traffic is going to drop after a launch.
Content Changes
Chances are you’ve made some minor (or major) changes to your website content. If you’ve kept SEO at the forefront of your website redesign, then you’ve likely updated your website copy with a keyword strategy in mind. This means Google is now taking note of these changes and considering their ranking factor and relevance to the topics you are targeting.
The restructuring of your content also plays a role. Did you update your website’s overall architecture and change internal links? If so, it’s a good idea to provide an updated sitemap to Google. Google Search Central provides a great intro to sitemaps and goes through scenarios of when you may need to submit a sitemap and when you may not.
Lastly, deleted pages. If you had pages that were bringing in the majority of organic traffic and those were deleted, then it’s clear why traffic is going to decline. When content is no longer relevant or no longer helping you attract the right audience, it’s okay to delete. But if you can, try to update your content and redirect instead.
URL Updates
A new site launch is the perfect time to update those links to follow a consistent structure. Your URLs should easily tell your users where they are on your site and what they’re viewing. If you’ve changed your URLs, then this becomes new data for Google to find and then store.
One scenario where this can have a major impact on your organic traffic is if you change your root domain. In this case, it can take slightly longer for your organic traffic to bounce back. Google has to again establish trust and credibility within your whole site. Also, another good reason to submit an updated sitemap.
As you’re updating your URLs be sure you’re also creating redirects from your old site to your new site. Utilizing 301 redirects ensures that your new site is found instead of your old one and it helps your pages keep their link authority. If a user had a page from your old site bookmarked, you want to make sure that a 301 redirect is in place so they can find your new site. It’s best practice to completely avoid any 404 errors on your site when users navigate to pages.
Still Having Issues?
You can typically expect your organic traffic to take a dip after a new website launch, but it should recover in at least 3-4 weeks. During this time, Google crawlers are doing their job and looking into all the updates we mentioned — and more. Even for some of our clients who’ve made drastic changes from their old site, we’ve seen a dip in the first month, and then a month over month increase in organic traffic.
If by the second month your not seeing organic traffic numbers rise, consider these possible scenarios to begin troubleshooting:
- Redirects were not in place: Did you implement 301 redirects for your root domain and pages you transferred over? Check out this resource on types of redirects and when to use them.
- Page load speeds are slow: Is your website optimized for both desktop and mobile experiences? Use PageSpeed Insights to check out how your site scores.
- Issues with Google Analytics code implementation: If you’re seeing issues with reporting across all sources, chances are there is an issue with your code. Double check with your developers to ensure there are no errors.
- Lack of an SEO plan: If showing up on Google is a goal, then you need to keep SEO at the front of mind. Redesigning a new site without an SEO expert and expecting it to rank highly is the equivalent of buying all the new houseplants and never watering them. You have to put in the work for search engine success, and doing it from the initial planning stages is the best thing you can do to save time and money. Learn more about optimizing your site for SEO success
If you’re just getting started on your new website launch, check out our guide on how to introduce your new website to ensure success with your users and audience. 🎉
