“I just spent a lot of money on a new website and it looks good, but I’m not getting any traffic. That’s why I invested in a new website to begin with!”
This week alone we received three calls in our office from disgruntled business owners that used a graphic design firm to create their website and now they have either lost traffic or are not getting any traffic to their new site. As a business owner, you invest your time and resources in a new website for a reason, and typically that is to make money. However, a nice looking design alone does not get you more traffic.
A web designer may be great at designing a website, but not have full knowledge of all of the elements that affect SEO (search engine optimization) both on and off the website. So to be fair, if you didn’t ask all the right questions at the beginning of the engagement, you probably ended up with what you asked for-- a great looking design. No need to be disappointed and frustrated, there are solutions. So what can you do now?
10 Basic SEO Elements to Check
1. Content - The content on each page of the website should be unique and specific to that page and have sufficient amounts of copy on the page. Be sure content such as videos, podcasts and PDFs have been properly labeled.
2. Keywords - Keyword research should have been conducted and utilized in the development of the copy to ensure the words & phrases used by your visitors are incorporated within the site.
3. Multiple Locations - If your business has more than one physical location, be sure that each location has a separate page on the website to help support search geo-locators.
4. Images - Check all images for accurate sizing, file optimization, file naming-protocol, alt tags, and title tags.
5. Links - When linking to other websites, select the links wisely as the use of too many links can weaken your domain authority.
6. On-Page SEO- Page titles, header titles, and meta descriptions need to be completed for each page on the website and should contain unique, page-specific information.
7. Redirects - If 301 redirects were created, be sure the internal links were pointed to the new page URLs, and any external links were adjusted accordingly.
8. Robot.txt - When a website is moved to the live server, the robots.txt from the test server may be inadvertently copied to the live server. If the robots.txt file is not updated to allow search engine robots to index the new site on the live server, the search engines will not be able to visit or view pages, leading to them being removed from the search engine index.
9. Patience - Any time a new website is launched, even with the application of best practice SEO standards, it still takes the search engines time to crawl and index the new elements of your website. Be patient! It is normal to not rank immediately.
Does this all sound like Greek? As a business owner, your job is to focus on what you are good at and partner with people who can help you in the areas that are not your strength-like SEO. Unintentional mistakes made during a website redesign by a graphic designer are to be expected, they like you, are not SEO experts. However, these mistakes are costly and can cause your site to disappear from search results and shut down traffic. The best place to start is with an audit of your website by an SEO professional to identify the potential causes of lost traffic.
What has been your SEO experience after a new website launch?
