To explain what happens to search rankings after launching a new website, we need to start with SEO.

WHAT IS SEO?

SEO, also known as search engine optimization, is the process of improving the quality and quantity of traffic to a website from search engines. It involves a variety of strategies - on-page SEO, off-page SEO, PR, social media, video, etc. It can involve some, none, or all of these elements to achieve success. Ranking organically for any keyword or key topic is a journey, not a race. And it requires strategic understanding to “rank” on the first page of any search engine - whether it’s Google, Bing, YouTube, or Amazon.

What can I expect when launching a new website in terms of search?

When a new website is launched, a few things change:

• 1. The website structure has changed.
• 2. Pages have been moved from their previous locations (e.g., the "About Us" page that was at /about-us/ might now be found at /about/).
• 3. The appearance of the website has been significantly modified.

To achieve these changes, developers practically rebuild the entire structure of your site from top to bottom. The hope is that the site is more user-friendly, faster, and more functional for your site's visitors, while also meeting new technological expectations. However, for search engines, the situation is a bit different.

When Google or any other search engine re-encounters your new sitemap, it needs to reassess its validity. The following aspects are considered:

1. 1. Are you still credible?
2. 2. Do you still have experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (EEAT) in your field?
3. 3. Is your content better, worse, or the same as before the site change? Is it more authoritative or less authoritative?
4. 4. Is your site faster and more mobile-friendly? Is it even, dare we say, mobile-first?
5. 5. Have you lost value or valuable links from sites that previously linked to you for domain authority?
6. 6. Did you remove many pages? Did you add many pages? Did you move pages in such a way that your sitemap now has deep folder structures (e.g., /about/careers/account-manager/specifications)? Did you bury previously top-level pages (/about/ is now in /a/b/c/about/)?
7. 7. Should you be penalized or are you violating Google's terms of service with the new update?
8. 8. Do you now have duplicate content on your site?
9. 9. Is your site secure?
10. 10. Did you correctly implement 301 redirects?

While sites are constantly evaluated for the aspects mentioned above, when everything changes rapidly, search engines "take a break" and try to determine what new value you bring to search engine users. For many businesses, it can sometimes be shocking to spend money on a new site and see your site's organic traffic drop after launch. Most often, these drops do happen. Typically, you can expect - at least from our experience - a drop of at least 5% and up to 50% in organic search traffic at launch. However, within a few weeks, this tends to improve, and usually (especially if SEO is part of our service package for you as a client), you will see continued improvements in the following months.

As mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, the answer is usually "it depends," and for good reason.

A few years ago, one of our clients decided to change their brand name to better encompass their services. In this sense, they decided to also change their domain name. So, instead of being, let's say, "samsdoorshop.com," they became "samscarpentry.com." One of their biggest concerns was what would happen to search rankings after developing a new website. Given that we have been involved in website launches for nearly 20 years, we shared the same concern.

To make the change, we contacted all the major sites that were linking to their previous site and asked and pleaded with them to change their link to the new URL, and many agreed. Sometimes it was just a record on the site and changing the link, while other times, it took emails and phone calls to make the updates happen. We also had to be very careful about how we redirected links from the old URLs of the site to the new URLs.

At launch, the site shock was severe. Organic traffic dropped - but having informed clients of this in advance - they were prepared for the repercussions. Although it took some time, we managed to navigate our SEO strategies to bring their rankings back to pre-launch levels and exceed them.

So, how the shock of a new website affects your business depends on many different factors. However, knowing that this happens is part of your digital journey. Trust that if your new site is built by a reputable company with a quality team or your agency partner provides quality search marketing services, as Forum does, you shouldn't worry about the near and long-term future.