topic Re: How do you keep your ranking on Google when launching a new website? in Content Hub for Marketers

How do you keep your ranking on Google when launching a new website?

gabriel-nextiny — Fri, 06 May 2022 18:28:45 GMT

One of the most important and most underrated SEO tasks is connected to the “go-live” process.

Please reply to this post and answer the following questions:

How do you keep your ranking on Google when launching a new website?

Re: How do you keep your ranking on Google when launching a new website?

danmoyle — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 15:39:45 GMT

If it's a completely new site and you have no ranking, it will take longer. If you're re-launching an existing site, make sure all of your technical SEO work is settled, then ensure you're following best practices from leaders like HubSpot, Moz, and SEMrush so you're set up for success. Then I would follow all that up with monitoring my positioning for my most important topics, and any deviation I would address immediately.

Re: How do you keep your ranking on Google when launching a new website?

gabriel-nextiny — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 13:23:02 GMT

Thanks for sharing @danmoyle !

Exactly! I would say one of the most important best practices that is sometimes overlooked is the auditing of all old website pages (before the new site goes live) and the creation of 301 redirects to new URLs if anything changed when the new site goes live.

Any other ones you recommend to double check?

Have a great week.

Re: How do you keep your ranking on Google when launching a new website?

Jnix284 — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 13:36:00 GMT

@gabriel-nextiny yes! so many people undervalue the work that goes into setting up the redirects. Every existing page should be redirected somewhere, if there is not a relevant page on the new site, it should go to the home page. No page left behind!

I went through a process several years ago of launching a new site, getting all the redirects in place, and then a year later transitioning to HubSpot - so I had to update the redirects from the first site to go to the third (instead of the second) and then setup new redirects from the second to third. The way HubSpot handles URL Redirects made this a much easier process the second time, even though we had twice the work.

I also think launching an update site is a good time for a keyword refresh, running through all page titles, meta descriptions, etc. to button things up.

Looking forward to seeing what others suggest to help retain your rank when launching a new site!