The short answer is that it is possible that your search engine results will change either positively or negatively when moving to Rocketspark. This is not specifically related to Rocketspark at all and is something you'll face regardless of where you move your website to.
Changes to Google ranking are a little bit like a large pot of soup. A lot of different ingredients go into the pot and combine to give a certain flavour. As you add or remove different ingredients from the recipe, that affects the flavour (or in the Google context – ranking). Just like with the pot of soup, some ingredients have a dramatic impact on flavour while other ingredients only have a subtle impact on flavour.
When you move your website to Rocketspark, there are a few "big flavour" ingredients or ranking factors that you can focus on to do your best to retain good rankings.
- VERY IMPORTANT: Go to the Manage Pages section in your dashboard to set up URL redirects from old pages to the corresponding new pages. When moving from your old website to a Rocketspark website, it's possible your page URLs may change, e.g., from mywebsite.com/services/ to mywebsite.com/page/services/. You can set up URL redirects from within your dashboard so that if someone clicks on your old URL in a Google search, it will still take them to the right page. Plus this tells Google that the old URL needs to be updated in search results to the new URL.
- You can quickly find out what pages of your site are indexed in Google by doing a search like "site:www.rocketspark.com" which will bring back all indexed pages for your site. (Replace rocketspark.com with your own domain name).
- The goal is that once you move to Rocketspark all the pages that are indexed in the results link to an appropriate page on your Rocketspark site.
- You can quickly find out what pages of your site are indexed in Google by doing a search like "site:www.rocketspark.com" which will bring back all indexed pages for your site. (Replace rocketspark.com with your own domain name).
- IMPORTANT: Make sure your title and description meta tags are copied to the new site. These are text descriptions for each page of your website that exist in the code and are one of the main things Google looks at to build your keyword ranking and Results. These can be set up in the Get Found (SEO) area of your Dashboard.
- To get your websites existing Title and Description tags is a little bit tricky. If you're already using a website system hopefully you can copy and paste them from the admin area of your old website. Alternatively, you can get them from the HTML source of each page:
- Right-click on the page and choose "View Source"
- Search for the <title></title> tag, the text between these brackets is the title tag.
- Search for <meta name="description". This tag should have a content attribute which has your page SEO Description.
- To get your websites existing Title and Description tags is a little bit tricky. If you're already using a website system hopefully you can copy and paste them from the admin area of your old website. Alternatively, you can get them from the HTML source of each page:
- Make sure high ranking pages still exist on the new site. If you have a page that is ranking very well in Google searches and that page ceases to exist on the new website, that will affect traffic to your website.
- If you have keyword-rich headings – keep them! Headings have a decent amount of impact on search rankings but only if they have the right keywords in them. If your new site abandons headings that had good keywords in them, that could affect your ranking. Another point to note around text content is that if you have a lot of keyword-rich text content on your old website and remove that on your new site in favour of just images, this can detrimentally affect your ranking.
- Make sure your most important keywords exist in your page content. Google doesn't just look at the content in your meta tags. They also look at the text on your page. It's especially important that your home page text mentions your most important keywords. One other thing to watch out for is putting important text embedded in images. Google can't read the text if it's in image form so it won't give you search engine ranking benefits.
- Don't change your domain name. While it doesn't have to be a rocky road, changing your actual domain name can give you a bumpy ride in Google searches for several months. We don't recommend changing a domain name at the same time as changing your website over to Rocketspark.
- Check your Google Adwords settings. If you are using Google Adwords be sure to add to your new website and conversion tracking you had on your old website. See this guide for adding conversion tracking codes to your website. Also, make sure that you update any URL's of pages in your ads so that your paid ads link to the correct page.
- Setup Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console). Keep track of your position and SEO health in Google searches by setting up Webmaster tools and monitoring the transition of your website to Rocketspark.
It is very rare that someone has moved their website to Rocketspark and their Google ranking worsened. Your rankings can improve when using Rocketspark but if you don't do the above points you are more vulnerable to a poor result.