Launching (or re-launching) a website is a major undertaking, and there’s plenty of work to be done to ensure that it’s successful. One of the most important things that can guarantee success or failure is the effort you put into your SEO. From redirects and tracking to SERPs and EEAT, Susanna Chaudhry shares what makes for a smooth website launch and what can create more issues.

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Full episode transcript:

Preston Parshall 0:14
Welcome to the digital marketers guide podcast where we break down digital marketing topics into bite sized episodes that can help make your marketing program and you a little better. I’m Preston Parshall, the founder and CEO of Fujisan marketing. We’re here today with Susanna Chaudhry to discuss SEO for website launches. Welcome to the show, Susanna.

Susanna Chaudhry 0:33
Hey, thanks for having me here.

Preston Parshall 0:35
So Susanna, why is SEO crucial before launching your website?

Susanna Chaudhry 0:39
Yeah, that’s a really good question. So I mean, first things first, obviously, I mean, it provides measurable results. That’s the whole thing with SEO, we want to drive as much traffic to the site. We want to be visible in the SERPs. Or if you don’t know what the SERPs are the search engine results pages, and just be able to really have that brand visibility that we want to see across the board. With the SEO for launching your new website, it’s really important to keep in mind the timeline that Google has when crawling and indexing your site, which is really important because you want to show up in those SERPs and get relevant traffic to your site. On top of that, SEO is crucial before launching your website because it helps build authority and trust, which is related to your SERP. And just really helps you understand your audience so that you can adapt to trends. And the main focus with this is to notice trends that are going on with the way users interact and behave with your website. And it offers an opportunity to kind of get ahead of the ball and notice how they’re coming to your site, and then leveraging that to draw more people to the site. So overall, it gives you really valuable insight into user behavior and how you can drive more traffic, it also gives you a competitive advantage. So in 2022, alone, there was a significant number of websites that didn’t engage in any type of SEO. And that’s actually really detrimental to websites and brands. Because not having SEO contributes to a lack of awareness. So basically, no one will know about your brand or services and hurts you in the long run when it comes to SERP ranking. And then also Domain Authority, which is another layer of SEO.

Preston Parshall 2:41
So Susanna, what would you say are two or three things that people should focus on in SEO for a website redesign?

Susanna Chaudhry 2:49
Alright, so the top two things that come straight to my mind are one redirects. redirects are really important just to notice what what potential dead links there are on the site that exist. If there’s any 404 errors present on the site, or if users are being directed to a page that has absolutely no content. It’s important to note that and take action as soon as possible because the goal with SEO is to not only drive traffic, but also make users take action on the website. The second thing would be tracking proper tracking setup is really important for SEO because you want to track the actions that are being taken on the website, along with how users are engaging with the site.

Preston Parshall 3:40
What would happen if someone doesn’t focus on SEO efforts before a site launch?

Susanna Chaudhry 3:45
Yeah, so if they don’t focus on SEO prior to the site launch, there’s quite a bit of things that can take place to really hinder the crawl ability of Google as well as indexing the site. So when proper SEO isn’t done, it can one put your site on the backburner for Google’s crawlability and indexing. So Google has a sandbox where they have to review your site before it really shows up on those SERPs, or to be ranked higher in those SERPs. So that being said, if the SEO isn’t done prior to launch, your site can be sitting in their sandbox for up to three months before you start generating relevant traffic to your site.

Preston Parshall 4:34
Yeah, I would agree with that. And I would say Additionally, there have been so many times over the years that people have come to us and they’ll say, my site traffic has dropped 40% After a website redesign, and I’ll ask them how long it’s been. And they’ll say it’s been two or three months. And I’ll say there’s nothing we can do for you. So if a website if the redirects haven’t been done, and there’s been major structural changes to the URLs The inbound links that were coming to the pages that were there before are no longer coming in. And once Google starts indexing again, those can be lost forever. So make sure you’re mindful of those redirects. Do you have any examples of a time when SEO was done correctly on a new website launch, where we saw the benefits?

Susanna Chaudhry 5:20
Yeah, I actually had a client about a couple months ago, that actually took a really smart approach on getting their website redesign done. And they did provide about a month time before the site was about to be fully launched. And so with that, the fact that we could get into the staging site one month prior to the site actually going live really did benefit us because we were able to get those get the site completely optimized for SEO. And so when it did launch, it showed up on the SERPs pretty pretty quickly. It took about three weeks for Google to really have it show up in those SERPs, and then also see that real time measurement of the traffic coming into Google Analytics.

Preston Parshall 6:12
Cool. What are some Common SEO Mistakes website owners make when it comes to SEO for website launches? Outside of not doing redirects and outside of not getting their tracking correct?

Susanna Chaudhry 6:25
Some of the most common mistakes is waiting too long to start SEO. We just went over how that is just super detrimental. Because one, you can sit in the sandbox for too long. And then to what takes a lot of time to get relevant traffic to your site.

Preston Parshall 6:41
Say all these things have been done. What is the next step to understand your website’s SEO and opportunities post launch? And do you have any success stories?

Susanna Chaudhry 6:49
Yeah, so the next step is definitely running a technical SEO audit. This will open up opportunities for you to understand what needs to be fixed within the site that could be with user experience that could be with the on page content, duplicate content, things like that. It just really unveils those opportunities where you can really grow your site and generate more traffic to the site.

Preston Parshall 7:17
What about success stories?

Susanna Chaudhry 7:18
Yeah, so some success stories with an HVAC company that we do SEO for and the thing with them is that this is a really low hanging fruit, but we do GMB posts for them or Google Business Profile posts. And as silly as that sounds, and small, we would post up their blogs in hopes of generating more traffic to the site. Now that did work. And it was really shown through Google Analytics when those GBP source sessions outranked the organic Google Search sources.

Preston Parshall 7:57
Yeah, that’s pretty common that a blog post can be one of the highest ranking pages on a website. Yeah, we’ve seen that a ton of times and you know, when you are creating that blog content, you need to get it out and each and every way and yeah, you’re right, GMB or GBP is a great way to do it. But so is email and so social. Thanks, Susanna, and thanks for listening to the digital marketers guide podcast. Be sure to subscribe to stay up to date when a new episode is released. If you have any feedback or topics you’d like to see covered, email us at contact@FujisanMarketing.com or learn more about us at FujisanMarketing.com. See you next time.