SEO for Website Redesign: 3 Ways Your Designer Can Fudge Up Your SEO
Are you about to be the owner of a brand new website?? Woohoo!
This is some seriously exciting shiz – I mean who doesn’t love a brand new look?
Let me briefly interrupt this joyous occasion to ask…
Have you given any thought to the impact your redesign might have on your search engine traffic?
You know, that good ol’ SEO stuff you’ve been putting some consistent work into. Or maybe not so much consistent but you get a pretty decent amount of traffic from The Google.
Did you know that your website redesign could potentially fudge all that up?
Sad to say but it’s true.
It doesn’t HAVE to mess it up – just make sure you & your designer are aware of some of the common issues when it comes to maintaining SEO for a website redesign.
3 Ways Your Designer Can Fudge Up Your SEO in Your Redesign
1 – No Redirect Strategy
No WHAT strategy? Redirect strategy. Redirects are a little techie way to forward your visitors to the NEW url when they attempt to visit the old one.
For GOOGLE to know that a page has moved, you need to setup what’s called a “301 Redirect” – not something you need to be worried about, your designer/developer should absolutely be able to do this for you.
What happens when you don’t have this in place? Let’s walk through an example:
Mary has bookmarked a post on your site because she loooooves it and refers to it often. Maybe she even sends a lot of her friends or clients to your site.
One day, after your redesign, Mary tries to visit that page BUT as part of your redesign, you decided to switch up the name of your site so instead of heading to www.yournewsite.com/marysfavoritepost she’s now hitting a 404 page (aka we don’t know what page you’re looking for) iwhen she tries to visit www.youroldsite.com/marysfavoritepost.
What happens when Google hits this same hiccup? It assumes the page has gone MIA and you lose traffic.
Ahh! Right?
I know but it’s a simple fix. Just ask your website designer if you’re changing the name of your domain (www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com) OR if you’re changing the structure of your URLs (www.yoursite.com/marysfavoritepost to www.yoursite.com/blog/marysfavoritepost) and if they have a plan for redirecting the old site to the new one.
PRO TIP: Some developers will try and get by with redirecting ANY traffic from your old site just to your new site’s homepage. This is not a good solution. You want a redirect strategy in place that redirects visitors to the same page but in it’s new location.
2 – They don’t move over your SEO settings
How long have you been trying to do this SEO thing for your site? If you’re not COMPLETELY new to the SEO game, you’ve probably be trying to optimize pages here and there for certain keywords.
If you’ve been doing this awhile, that means you probably have 100 or more pages that you’ve done SEO tweaking too. That’s a lot!
If your developer doesn’t have SEO in mind, they might not think it’s important to bring over the settings you’ve ALREADY setup for alllll those pages. Some designers might even just want to start from scratch on your site and not bring much over.
Starting from scratch is not only completely unnecessary but it can hurt your search traffic!
If you suddenly lost all your title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags, etc. – you would almost certainly start to see a drop in Google traffic. Let’s avoid this!
PRO TIP: If you’re using WordPress and you’re using an SEO plugin to do a lot of this for you, you’ll want to make sure your developer brings over the data from the existing plugin instead of just installing the plugin again on your new site. Without that data coming with you, you’re starting from zero!
3 – Pages get deleted
This is another one that’s related to your redirect strategy.
When you’re doing a website redesign, sometimes you’re doing it as a part of a branding shift or business shift as well.
Part of that means that you might not think a lot of your old content “fits” with your new site and so you don’t want to bring it over.
Or maybe you’re just embarrassed from some of your early blog post writing days.
Your instinct may be to hit the DELETE button on content you don’t want to bring over.
I urge you – STOP!
All of that content – especially if it’s “old” content – is probably bringing you some significant traffic.
But yes, I get that you still might not want to bring anything over.
Instead, I suggest creating a landing page for all of these old pieces of content. Something along the lines of “Hey! You must be looking for one of older posts or pages from XYZ. We’ve since shifted our business in X way and our content along with it! You might enjoy one of these pieces instead: (then list out a few of your best pieces on the new site or refer them to other sites who may continue to support what they’re looking for)”
PRO TIP: Never delete a piece of content if you can help it. Instead redirect it to the next best thing.
Oh, but there’s more
There’s a definitely a lot to consider from an SEO perspective when it comes to redesigning your site and avoiding the dreaded loss in traffic.
Let me get clear on one point – you WILL experience a drop in search traffic in a website redesign – almost no matter what. (In fact, you might want to add one of these to your Google Analytics account) It’ll take Google a little while to get to know your site again.
The idea is to minimize this drop and hasten the recovery.
Of course, there’s more you could pay attention to – updating old links, keeping an eye on the structure of your internal links on your site, updating Google Webmaster Tools, creating a new sitemap… and more.
If you’re going through a website redesign, planning one in the future, or just went through one and are experiencing the dreaded drop in traffic, let’s chat. Usually, I can help 
Over to You
Have you ever experienced a drop in traffic from a website redesign? Are you going through one right now? Are you a developer or designer who’s been through this before and have some more tips to share for those who might not have SEO in mind? Share with me in the comments!
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