EP4: Strategic Planning for SEO: Keeping Your Rankings Intact Amid Changes

So, you've started improving your online visibility. Your rankings are growing every day, and you're getting more and more traffic to your website. However, let's talk about some things that could hurt your online visibility that you might not be aware of.

Welcome to The Visibility Boost. My name is Glenneth Reed and I'm going to be your host.

So many times I have people come to me and we work on their SEO.

We get more traffic through paid ads. Things are going great in their business. And one thing they don't tell me is: they've always wanted to redo their website and now they have a little extra money and they go get it done.

Redoing your website, rebranding – That can be a fabulous thing. But you need to make sure your developer is aware that you have had SEO work done on your website. Talk to your SEO person to make sure that things don't get missed. One of the things that gets missed is all the title tags and meta descriptions that your SEO person probably did with the alt text and on page optimizations seemed to go missing when a website is being redone.

And what does that hurt?

That hurts your rankings. And that can be a significant drop in rankings almost immediately. So, if you are planning on redoing your website and then you've had SEO work done. Get those two contractors together and let them talk about it. Make a plan and set a strategy to make sure that your risk and drop in rankings is minimal. Now, you probably will, just in general, have a drop in rankings.

That's just kind of a certainty. But make a plan so that it's as low as possible. And that you're doing other things to try to improve your rankings.

Another thing people do that can hurt their online visibility is adding a ton of videos to your website and not doing it properly. You never want a video to live on your website.

You want it to live on a place like YouTube or Vimeo – somewhere else. And you want to embed it into your website. Why? Performance reasons – having that video live on your site and have to load fully will cause your site not to load as fast. And as we talked about in a previous podcast site speed is a ranking factor. So, create those gorgeous videos. But upload them to YouTube, then embed them to your website.

Something else that can hurt your rankings that a lot of people don't realize is changing your business, name, your domain name, your address or your phone number, especially if you are a local business.

Changing any one of those four can cause a significant loss of rankings. Changing more is definitely going to cost your rankings. You need to be prepared and you actually just need to know that you will have a significant drop and it may take you 6 to 12 months to recover from it. So that may be a time when you're making these changes that you think about doing paid ads to recover those rankings and just go ahead and bypass organic and show up when people are searching for you. Again, if you're starting to do this, talk to your SEO person, your marketing person to make a plan and a strategy for any of these changes that are necessary for your business.

I get it. All of this needs to be done. But you don't want to do it and then go, oh my gosh, what happened?

And it can be as little as changing just the number of your address. I had a client once – same name, same domain name, same phone number. He moved his business across the street. He had the same street name, just a different number address, and his rankings dropped. And it took probably three to six months to get back to where he was now.

We knew it. We had a plan. We ran Google ads. But it's one of those things, if you don't know, and if you're not tracking can really come back and slap you in the face. Like, oh my gosh, what happened? Just this year, I was able to work with two of my clients who went and had their websites redone, but because I'm monitoring their rankings and their traffic, I was able to quickly say, hey we've got something going on here.

Look at their website and go, oh, this is the problem. Okay. Let's pivot. And do this. And where the website developer hadn't put the SEO information on the site correctly. Quickly fix that. And now they're rankings are even above where they were before, because the website is prettier and is doing better.

There's so many more things that can hurt your online visibility.

These are just a few, and we're going to talk about these more in depth in future podcasts. But these are some of the biggest things that can hurt your online visibility that you may or may not think about as you were going through your regular business life, as you're working on your website, as you're getting things redone as you're working with different contractors. So I wanted to make sure that you were aware of these.