Your New Website: Prepare to Drop Organic Placement

Planning Ahead with You Launch a New Website is Important
Planning Ahead with You Launch a New Website is Important

Plan ahead, bringing a new website online does mean that you will drop organic placement. It happens! Sometimes with redirects, after 4 to 6 weeks a website will pop back up in organic placement, but sometimes, the site stays down and does not regain the placement that the original site had.

It is a reality and one that you should honestly prepare for when you launch a new website. It may be smart to build your new website at a new domain, so you do not lose your organic placement of your old site. If that is not an approach you would like to take, know that you will drop and plan a pay per click budget to drive traffic to your new website and get started quickly with blogging and content creation to try to build inbound links and help your site regain position.

Many businesses will own multiple domains and it may make sense to use one of your domains and leave your legacy website alone. Especially if you have thousands of blog posts and thousands of inbound links.

If your site is relatively small and has under 150 inbound links, your placement is not so strong that you cannot overwrite the URLs on your site and damage your organic placement.

Be careful and thoughtful about the changes you want to make beforehand so you are prepared in case your site does fall significantly in the organic results.

Citations and Local Ranking

Get More Business When You Place Locally
Get More Business When You Place Locally on Google.com

What’s the connection between citations and local ranking? Well, first Google uses citations which include your phone number and address for location specific ranking in the organic index.

Because citations are important to place for local searches here are some of my tips to assure that you do everything in your power on your website pages to try to place for location specific searches in your local area.

  1. Make sure you have your full address and phone number in your footer.
  2. Make sure to spell out your state and not use the abbreviation.
  3. Format your phone number either as 540-693-0385 or (540) 693-0385 and do not use . as separators. Google’s preferred use in AdWords is (540) 693-0385 for all instances that they call in phone numbers.
  4. If possible get local links that feature your website URL, business address and phone. I like the Chamber of Commerce for links like this.
  5. Make sure to claim your Google My Business and Bing My Business pages. These are great ways to also add your address and phone number.
  6. Make sure that you review online what your address and location shows. If it is incorrect, make attempts to correct the data.

Most businesses want local placement. Assuring that you are reference properly in citations around the web starts first with assuring that you have the information posted clearly on your own website.

Helping Your Blog Writer Do A Better Job

Blogging is a core business for my firm, McCord Web Services. I have found that website owners that take a little bit of time to help our writer get their footing, help us to do a better job delivering what they need for organic search placement and development of web authority.

Here are a few tips to help your blog writer when you start blogging.

  • Make sure to let your writer know your audience – age, gender, typical demographics.
  • Supply a short list of about ten keyword phrases that you think people will use to find you.
  • Offer a short selection of links of blog sites that you like for style and content.
  • Let them know which two or three blogs you read in your own industry.
  • Be patient, it will typically take four to eight blog posts for the writer to hit a stride in writing for you.
  • Make sure to read your own blog and help the writer to understand what you like so that they can do more of that particular topic or style of blog post.
  • As you browse the web send them links of content that you think would make a great background for a blog post. This actually helps them to know what you like.

The more initial interaction you have with your blog writer the better and more effective the blog posts will be for your personal business needs. That doesn’t mean that you need to do these steps beyond the initial break in period, but for the first week to two weeks your input will be hugely helpful and will shape the future of your blog post content.

If you are looking for quality blog writers for your own blog, I invite you to review our services.