New Website = Drop in Ranking??

Redesigning A Website Can Hurt Your Rankings

As times change companies need to occasionally update their website whether due to company expansion, changes in business direction, or just because the current website is outdated.  There are a lot of factors that need to be considered when choosing to redesign a website.  A highly ranked website that does not convert well is almost as useless as a beautiful highly converting website that can’t be found in the search engines.

Safely Updating A Website

When deciding to give your website a facelift or complete redesign MAKE SURE to find a quality web design company that understands the basics of on-page SEO that can work with your SEO company.  Most web design companies are terrible at SEO and most SEO experts are terrible at web design.  With the right communication and pre-planning between all parties a website can be updated into a beautiful highly converting site without jeopardizing already achieved SEO rankings.

Tips for Safe Website Upgrade

• Ensure the page URL’s remain exactly as they were

• A proper canonical URL tag is implemented in the code

• Basic content remains the same or very similar (proper keyword usage)

• When changing URL structure (Only when needed), page forwarding has to be done in a certain way to forward the old link juice to the new page

• A quality and functional sitemap should be CAREFULLY thought out BEFORE redesigning the site