I have rebuilt a website on a new domain and followed SEO protocol to maintain authority, but the results and rankings are declining.

[Web3Marketing87]

We took over an account for a company called knightdoorservices.com who specialize in doors and windows in Edmonton, Alberta. We built them a new website on a new domain: knightdoorsandwindows.com. We did 301 redirects on all of the old URLs so that they now point to the new URLs so most of the authority should transfer over. Additionally, each page has a properly optimized title, h1 tag, a series of pertinent alt tags, and many instances of the focus keyword for that particular page. Additionally, the website loads quickly and has many high authority inbound links pointing to the domain. We have done this for many other companies and have seen their rankings maintain their position or increase. Is there something that I am missing for this company in particular? Thanks so much!

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Well, rankings drop (at least for some time) is pretty much unavoidable when changing domain name.

Now, you are saying that there are lots of high authority backlinks to that domain - i check and ahrefs tells me there are only 12(!) backlinks alltogether and MOZ OSE says there are none at all. Well, here is your problem!

I checked backlink profile for old domain and yes, there is a decent backlink proile, so that's why there is a drop. Just give it some time and build some fresh backlinks.

[Web3Marketing87]

You are a good man, Dmitri. I appreciate your expertise. So basically, just don't worry, trust the process, and make sure the backlinks are actually working! Thanks!

[Malika1]

A separate project should be undertaken to change the url from knightdoorservices.com to knightdoorsandwindows.com for all the old backlinks that have been acquired so far.

301 redirects only pass on some of the link equity. So it's very important that you fix the website url in those backlinks

By doing this, you should see some improvements soon.

[MarieHaynes]

I have a few thoughts.

First, the new site's homepage has very little content above the fold.

Next, in ahrefs I'm only seeing 1 followed link and that's from a kind of low quality directory.

I see that you are ranking for some terms such as "front doors edmonton" but it is inner pages, not your home page that are ranking. Those pages don't have the full page slider and have some text above the fold, so that's probably what I'd try to change first on the home page.

Have you done a fetch and render as googlebot on the home page?

[Web3Marketing87]

Thanks for this advice!

[Web3Marketing87]

Thank you for sharing your expertise. It's greatly appreciated!