Congratulations you worked on a new website to replace your dated website and need to launch the update without tanking your current search engine results. So what steps should you take?
1. Establish Website Performance Metrics
2. Track Changes to Page URLs
3. Have a Stranger Test Your Website
4. Don’t Forget the SEO
5. Launching the New Website
Establish Website Performance Metrics
- How many visitors are coming from search engines?
- What keywords is your website currently ranking for?
- How many calls and conversions is your website driving?
- What is the average amount of pages a visitors views per visit?
- How many of your pages are currently indexed by search engines?
Track Changes to Page URLs
Have a Stranger Test Your Website
- What do I want visitors to do when coming to my website?
- Is my content readable and clear?
- Does the website work well?
Don’t Forget the SEO
A new website might mean new pages and images. Make sure each page of your website has useful keyword-optimized meta descriptions and title tags for SEO.
Images should also all have Alt text added to them. Alt text on images provides a text alternative for search engines.
Use h1, h2, and h3’s thoughtfully. Header tags help search engines understand the structure of the content on the page and what the page is about. It also helps site visitors by breaking up content into sections that are easier to read and understand.
Launching the New Website
You feel confident in your new website and have launched it. Now it’s time to do the following:
- Implement your 301 redirects.
- If your domain changed from HTTP to HTTPS make sure to update your address in Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
- Check your website manually. Use a search engine to find your website and click on the results. Are all of them going to the proper page and behaving properly?
- Check your website site speed in tools like GTMetrix or PageSpeed Insights. A slow website will harm your search engine results.
- Tell the world about your new website update. Sharing the news on social media and releasing a Press Release are great ways to draw attention to your new website and encourage search engines to crawl the new pages more frequently.
