What to Expect When You’ve Just Optimized Your Website

A lot of business owners have unrealistic expectations about what happens once your already live website is re-optimized.

Unfortunately, your website won’t automatically show up on the first page of Google, much as we wish it could.

What to expect if you just re-optimized

If you’re planning on doing a major re-optimization project, here are a few ways to prepare yourself first.

You won’t get re-indexed immediately

You’ve just made some changes – often major changes – to your website.

Since your site already exists, what the search engines are going to do is take a beat to re-crawl your website…thoroughly. It may take some time for the engines to update the index of your website, but you can install Google Search Console to ensure your website changes get indexed as soon as possible.

You won’t see positive rankings immediately

While they’re crawling, you won’t see a positive rankings change…and you may even see a negative one. This is simply because Google is tapping the breaks on your rankings in order to make sure your website is still talking about the same topic(s).

You’ll see a dip in traffic

Contrary to popular belief, you won’t see a boost in traffic right away either. Since your search engine rankings more than likely dropped, it’s going to have an effect on your traffic as well.

How can you avoid waiting on positive change?

The reality few website owners realize is that after you make major changes to your site, you could be waiting up to 3 months to see positive changes. That’s on the long end, but you’ll still have to wait a significant amount of time after relaunch to see much upward changes.

If you’re unable or unwilling to wait, think about some of these other options after you re-optimize:

• Create a Google AdWords campaign.
• Create content.
• Wait to optimize for a re-design of your website.