Next Steps: Following Fixed On-Page Efforts

[ExploreConsulting]

A client of mine migrated their website from one platform to another.  The site is primarily about lead generation. The individual managing the migration did most of the right things: They thinned out poor content, they set up the appropriate canonical tags and 301 re-directs, the did outreach to quality websites providing inbound links and were able to achieve a reasonable level of URL updates to new URL structure, they cleaned up most of the on-page user experience and on-page keyword items (title tags, meta descriptions, HTML/JS/CSS coding, usage of HTML5 structure for headers/body/footers, etc.

During the transition, about a dozen primary keyword phrases lost impression and traffic volume - and most likely conversions. A simple analysis showed that the content and on-page elements in these cases were likely muddled with an unclear strategy. Too many different concepts were co-mingled and thus they lost rank on these relevant terms.

Working with the client, we've created a few new pages to separate these important concepts, created nice new content and updated all the on-page elements. We've also altered the 301 redirects and canonicals to better associated backlinks to these divided pages. We've also updated the sitemap and submitted.

Okay - all sounds good - now my question is: So what? What happens next? Should I request a fetch from Google? Should I run a campaign / article that discusses each of these concepts separately and then point the readers to these pages to drive some traffic to the new pages associated with those keywords? Is that even necessary? How do I get Google/Bing to recognize the client uncovered and repaired their previous error - and how long should this take? Days? Weeks? Months?

Thanks

[Everett]

Hello Steve,

It is difficult to say how long it will take because Google handles different sites at different speeds depending on things like domain-level trust metrics, how often the pages get updated, how easy the site is to crawl, etc...

Generally speaking, bouncing back after a complete site migration takes a couple of months, which can be shortened by following best practices, most of which it sounds like you've already done.

I would submit a new XML sitemap (replace the old one) and then fetch these new pages as Googlebot. Then if you want to write a useful blog post that links to those pages it would help get them crawled and indexed, while also building some internal pagerank for them.

Good luck.