SEO: The Key to Success in Your Website Launch

Launching a new website can have serious implications on your website’s SEO performance.

You may have heard horror stories about how brands spend a lot of time on the branding, customer experience, and content of their redesigned website but plummet in traffic after the launch. What is even worse is that a loss in organic traffic is usually directly intertwined with a loss in page authority, and can be nearly impossible to recover if the right steps are not taken after that initial launch phase.

A crucial component to Rise’s website development process is the integration of SEO. Mastering this approach has allowed us to optimally restructure our client’s website and boost their traffic after the launch.

In a recent virtual event, Jean Zhang, VP of Customer Experience, discussed three key considerations Rise utilizes when incorporating SEO:

• Redirect strategy: The first thing you want to look at is that you have set up a strong redirect strategy. Usually, the Rise team will have a 1-to-1 URL mapping process which ensures that we are retaining organic traffic from past pages. Furthermore, for the purpose of user experience, we want to make sure that when consolidating topics we are still directing certain key pages to the appropriate corresponding page. In more complex website redesigns, Rise will use a scalable mapping strategy that will take categories of pages and map them to different pages.
• Involve teams in the navigation and sitemap structure: The next key consideration is to heavily involve your SEO team within the navigation and sitemap work. With our website development projects, the Rise user experience and SEO team will work together to understand how users are searching for content, not just on a client’s website, but across search engine trends as well. Taking this step will help your websites rank higher for key content that users are searching for.
• Implement XML sitemaps and robots.txt files: Lastly, you want to incorporate a strong technical strategy, specifically your XML sitemaps and robots.txt files. XML sitemaps help us tie the bow around the whole process. Making changes to a website allows us to map old and new, while also helping search engine crawlers understand where all the new pages live. Utilizing robot.txt files minimize any issues with duplicated and lean content, and will direct the crawlers to your website appropriately.

Implementing these three key considerations to your SEO strategy is a crucial step in any website development project. Not only will you have a better understanding of how your users are searching for content, when it comes time to launch you will be giving your redesign the best shot at succeeding. If your brand is interested in learning more on how to best integrate SEO into your website development, reach out to Rise.