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Keyword ranking took a huge hit after site redesign — why?
I work at an agency and one of our clients recently redesigned their entire website. They are reporting a 75% dip in keyword ranking.
I want to be able to explain why this happened, and what we can do to try and address this.
For one, I know that a dip in keyword ranking is to be expected when launching a redesigned website. We have already told them that it could take 6+ months for Google to catch up and their keyword rankings will start improving again, including gaining new keywords from their new content. But, 75% does seem quite high. However, they did like, REALLY redesign their website. They completely restructured it and I think most if not all of the content is brand new.
They are asking for what fixes they can do to increase keyword rankings… my only suggestion as of right now is to make sure redirects were set up correctly. Other than that, is it not just a waiting game at this point?
Only other thing I can think of is just optimizing their content for the keywords they want to rank for, but even that is going to take time to see results (3-6 months, yes?).
I want to check and see if my assessment is correct, and see if you all have any other suggestions on how to handle this client and what recommendations you would give. Thank you!
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1 Reply
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75 % is too much something has gone wrong to be hit with that much of a loss, but it depends what the re design was did you replace the content with better ? This is what should have happened, even if you kept the same content the rankings should be the same there shouldn’t be any loss if you did it properly.
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Site architecture is huge, if they completely changed the sitemap, Google doesnt know what’s different yet
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It will never take 6 months for a site to recover from a redesign unless something was done terribly wrong.
Why they saw such a drastic drop really depends on what was done. My first guess would be that a lot of URLs changed and the web designer was incompetent and didn’t bother to put 301 redirects in place.
That’s about the only time you would see a drop that drastic.
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