Redesign SEO: Preserve Website PageRank
Your site has a unique footprint on the web. The combined factors of its age, content (including keyword use and meta tags), architecture, and backlinks is shared by no other site on the Web. The value Google and the other search engines assign to each of the factors—for your site and every other site on the web—is also unique and is what enables them to determine a ranking order for the search results when someone performs a keyword search.
Usually, everything runs along smoothly for your site and its search engine ranking factors. As time progresses for a site and its peers (your competitors), those factors gradually strengthen due to increased age, more backlinks, more content, and fully crawled architecture. This means that with all other things remaining equal, your site’s strength stays roughly at parity with its peers and they all gradually develop a natural ranking and traffic advantage over sites that are new to your niche.
However, there are actions that can disrupt a search engine’s orderly assignment of value for your site’s ranking factors. The redesign of your website is one of those actions. A re-design often revises some or all of the following: page content, site architecture, page names, images, and internal linking—i.e., many of the same things that make up your footprint. Wholesale changes to these elements without an understanding of their unique importance to your site’s current rankings can cause the search engines to reset some or all of their values to zero. In that case, your site looses parity with its peers and becomes the equivalent of a new site in your niche. Such a thing is an oh-so-common occurrence today and can cause your company to lose years worth of investment in your site and not even know it until it is too late.
Eliminate The Potential For A Disastrous Drop in TrafficOur Website redesign consulting eliminates to a high degree the potential for a disastrous drop in traffic and rankings that can result from your website redesign. We review and document the ranking factors that are critical to your legacy site’s current performance and work with your web design team to ensure that your new site incorporates them correctly.
SEO Redesign Consulting Is Especially Valuable For:
ecommerce sites that are being redesigned with new front-ends and/or shopping carts - Websites that have been optimized in the past
- Sites that contain a large amount of authoritative information which is being linked to from other sites
- Websites that are changing to a new content management system
- Websites that are changing domain names
- Considering moving a network of sites to a new host, domain or new IP address
- Almost any site that is more than five years old
Make Your Website Redesign Projects More Profitable
Most sites rely on links from other websites to bring them their traffic—links in search engines, links in directories, links in social media sites, and links on other websites. Every link from every site has a unique reason for being there and each has a unique reason for the number of visitors it brings to your site. As such, every link to your site has a unique value to you.
Search engines such as Google link to your site based on its content and its authority and the number of people who click on that link is determined by how close to the top of the rankings it is, i.e., higher rankings equals the potential for more traffic. Every change to your site and its contents has an impact on the factors that the search engines use to determine how high it should rank for a particular keyword and thus, every change has a potential impact on your traffic.
The links to your site from other sites not only helps bring you more traffic, search engines place a value on them as part of their keyword ranking factors. The words used in those links, the pages on your site they point to, and the content on those pages all play a part in your rankings and traffic.
Changes to your content, meta tags, page names, navigation, internal linking, and URL structure can dramatically impact any number of factors that are helping your rankings and traffic. Since the very nature of a redesign is to make changes to your site, an impact is inevitable and that is where SEO consulting for website redesign comes in.
It's everything you need for a successful transition to a redesigned website.
As an added value to your design clients, seriously consider the fact that the investment they made in their existing site has developed an amount of equity with the search engines. That equity may be substantial or it may be minimal but certain steps must be taken in the redesign in order to preserve it.
1. Use your stats to document search engine traffic--including volume and keywords used by visitors.
2. Document rankings in each of the search engines for keywords identified in your stats as bringing you search traffic. Once the new site is live and has been indexed in the search engines, you can use your initial report as a baseline to measure any positive or negative changes.
3. Identify which pages bring in traffic for which of your keywords and understand what elements of those pages are instrumental in acquiring that traffic.
4. Determine which pages have backlinks pointing to them from other sites on the Web. If changing page names or extensions can't be avoided, be sure to use proper redirects and/or mod rewrites to help preserve their value.
Smell that?To the search engines, especially Google, the URL is a container within which is held the accumulated values assigned to the page's content, back links, age, trust, click through data, page views, and a lot more.
The search engines measure and assign a relative value to each of these ingredients, as well as a combined value for the sum of all of the ingredients for each of your pages.
Change the URL and-- poof--what might have been years of investment in creating a page that ranks well or has authority in the search engines can go up in digital smoke!
Metapilot can help you avoid this problem by taking the proper steps when redesigning your website. |
