After recent success with a major corporate insurance client’s SEO website redesign, Essential Marketer advises clients that a website redesign doesn’t have to signal an abrupt halt to search engine traffic and SEO disaster.
Many times, new clients have come to Birmingham SEO consultants, Essential Marketer, having had a brand new site built with traffic volumes taking a significant nose dive on the day the new site was launched.
Essential Marketer Managing Director, Steve Feeney said: “Many web developers can destroy Google’s trust in a site overnight, wiping out a domain’s history, by renaming, meta data, changing URLs, changing the internal linking structure, and worst of all removing pages that have back links from external sites!
“It doesn’t matter how large or small a business is, if website traffic drops off a cliff due to a poorly planned site rebuild, it can take many months, sometimes years, just to get back to the original ranking position; for the executive in charge of the website this can be a very scary place to be.
“In most cases, inexperienced web developers aren’t aware of the damage being caused by renaming things. All they care about is getting the site rebuilt and uploaded within the project timescale, then moving on to their next project, leaving the client bewildered as to how their wonderful new site brings in less traffic than its predecessor.”
When a client approaches Essential Marketer to rebuild a site, the first question asked is exactly why they want to rebuild the site and then show them the strengths of the existing site identifying where the true value lies. In many cases clients want to slim down the site by removing pages of content that they feel don’t have any conversion benefit. What clients and most web developers don’t see is the real value behind each page. Removing many pages at once is like removing books from a library and just leaving a small shelf of books.
Time and again the team at Essential Marketer uses this analogy to describe in simple terms why slimming down a site by removing content is bad for a site’s domain authority. Using this analogy, if the library were to leave the books in the back room instead of removing them, they would still have a value.
“We recently rebuilt a new corporate client’s site, taking great care to analyse every page’s worth, then rebuilding the site taking this data and much more into account.
“When the new site went live, not only did we protect the site’s value in Google, but we enhanced it so it performed better than it did before the redesign,” concludes Steve.
For anyone looking for an SEO website redesign, check out our tips or contact our team of experienced SEO consultants who are always available to talk you through the potential site redesign pitfalls. In summary, our advice is to not rush into a website redesign, but to take time to thoroughly plan and assess your current site’s true value to both your company and Google.
