1) People tend to take their Google rankings for granted until they lose them
Too often, people mistakenly believe their search engine rankings are much more automatic than they actually are. In fact, SEO can be a one strike you are out environment. You can do a hundred things right - get one crucial element wrong and it can undo everything else you do.
The costs of SEO website redesign mistakes are extremely high. The difference between being number one or number two for a search is the loss of half the click through traffic. The difference between being the top of page one on Google or the top of page two is thirty five times the traffic.
This steep fall off in click through rates can make your Google Analytics traffic reports look like your traffic has driven off a cliff if certain key ranking elements are lost in the site redesign and you inadvertently move backwards in search results.
You want to track your search engine rankings closely before the new site goes live so you have a clear baseline for comparison. Always be prepared to revert to a backup of the current site as a reset if something doesn’t go as expected on search engines.
2) The focus of website redesigns are primarily on what is going to be added to the site – what’s overlooked is auditing the elements that are achieving current rankings
Search engine spiders that crawl your site for ranking often view it very differently than humans. The GoogleBot is just a robot bean counter that counts your keywords. It can’t see images or how great your site looks which is why for the most part, Google is very text based.
Rewriting copy so it is more effective at converting customers is a good thing that everyone is in favor of. But you don’t want to make the mistake of that being at the expense of reducing visitors to the site from search engines at the current level.
Too often in the creative process what gets lost are the elements that are achieving current rankings. This can result in a disastrous drop in search engine traffic. Being proactive and not allowing this SEO mistake to occur should be the highest priority with a website redesign.
Rankings are always a combination of onsite factors such as keyword densities, and offsite factors such as the appearance of keywords in the link text of links pointing to a site. The higher your PageRank and rankings resulting from offsite links, the less dependent you are upon onsite factors to hold your rankings.
However never forget, only the GoogleBot knows that algorithm for sure. Onsite factors are the changes you can make that you have one hundred percent control over so you always want to do as much as you can there because it all adds up in your quality score for ranking.
At the end of the day, Google has the last say. Most people will consider the website redesign a success or a failure if they see the site optimized and traffic up - or the website devalued with traffic down. Because Google always has the last say, that's why it's so important to involve an SEO from the very begining of the website redesign process to be certain it is built search engine friendly from the bottom up.
3) Reducing the amount of text and keywords on the homepage with the result of reducing the number of keywords the site can compete for
Like it or not, Google’s ranking algorithms are very text dominated. Sites with higher text to web page ratios tend to do better in the rankings. Sites with more text on the homepage (up to a point) are able to compete for a wider range of keywords.
What often happens when site redesigns expand the size of images and reduce the amount of text is that on a purely statistical basis, it will compete for a fewer number of searches spiders can see in your homepage text where most of your ranking strength is usually focused. If you cut the number of keywords on the homepage in half it can easily cut your traffic from lost rankings in half or more.
Often, information that is keyword targeted and crucial for rankings gets burried on a secondary "About" page that doesn't have the PageRank to compete like the homepage. A fundamentaly different way humans experience websites and spiders for ranking are that humans click to other pages - spiders rank you one page at a time.
Another issue with word length is the longer people stay on the page reading it, the better it is viewed by Google as an information rich site by measuring the length of stay on the page. Look at the rankings and note Google tends to favor text rich sites with complete grammatically correct sentences with periods at the end.
Always have a "Plan B" backup plan in place if homepage text is reduced in case rankings take a dip after publication.
4) Failure to do an SEO keyword audit of the most important entrance page content
Use Google Analytics under main menu selection “Content” to see what pages are receiving the most rankings and traffic, and are the most important entrance pages to the site. Make these pages your top priority in terms of SEO which you must meet or exceed or lose traffic.
This means taking into consideration page titles, body text keyword densities, number of words on the page - as well as more behind the scenes elements like headline designations and image alternative text.
Whenever text is being dropped from an important entrance page for an existing site you should always first do a keyword audit counting your keywords to see exactly what is being lost. It is a major SEO website redesign mistake to remove keywords current rankings are dependent upon without counting them or you are working blind.
Once you know that figure, ask what text will be put on the site in its place to compensate for the loss which meets or exceeds the current ranking algorithm?
Change or delete these elements without knowing what you are losing in terms of keyword mentions can easily change your rankings – although usually not in the way you would prefer when the choices are made blind.
Far too frequently, marketing changes copy without any consideration of whether or not the former copy was optimized and bringing in keyword targeted traffic.
5) Converting text to images spiders can’t see for ranking
Because Googlebot is blind and can’t see images or text embedded images, converting text to images spiders can’t see is an SEO website redesign mistake that can easily reduce your rankings. Although image alternative text is an important ranking factor on all the major search engines, it doesn’t carry as much ranking weight as plain text.
Follow Google's Webmaster Guidelines, "Avoid converting text to images" whenever possible in a website redesign.
6) Loading Speed Time
Loading speed is now part of Google’s algorithm. A site redesign is the perfect opportunity to re-code, condense externally referenced files, and achieve faster load times. Be careful not to inadvertently increase loading speed time by adding images and objects without checking how quickly each one loads.
Check loading speeds across a wide range platforms including satellite and dial-up speeds as many loading speed problems multiply hugely at slower speeds when many people are accessing the server at a given moment that we have no control over. Check your website's average loading speed under "Performance" in Google Webmaster Tools. Google strongly recommends webmasters monitor site performance using Page Speed, YSlow, and WebPagetest.
7) Be sure to keep spiders off the work-in-progress site
Keep spiders off the work-in-progress site with either; 1) Password protected staging site, or with a 2) Noindex, nofollow and disallow in robots.txt file to keep spiders from crawling it. Google Webmaster Tools will provide you this coding under “Crawler access.”
It is a major SEO website redesign mistake to allow the staging site to be crawled and enter Google’s index. The result can be GoogleBot seeing the content first on the work-in-progress site and viewing the beta site as the authoring site. It then views the final publishing of the website on the main domain as duplicate content of secondary importance.
What happens is just when the release of the new website is announced, no one can find it on Google because it’s been knocked out of the rankings by the duplicate content URLs of the work-in-progress site. This SEO mistake can take weeks or months to straighten out depending upon the crawl rate of the site unless the URLs where Google first viewed the content are removed from the index using Google Webmaster Tools under “Settings”.
|
