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This is a nightmare scenario we hear about frequently. Your business launches a brand-new, great-looking website, but within weeks you notice the typical number of calls and emails have stopped. Then you run a Google search and realize you’re nowhere to be found.
When choosing a company to rebuild your website, it’s critical to ask the right questions – especially about how they plan to protect your existing search rankings. Too often, we see businesses hire a web design company that completely disregards this crucial step, only to watch years of hard-earned SEO progress vanish overnight.
Sadly, there are web design companies out there that don’t take your search engine ranking into consideration. They’ll build you a great-looking website, but when you ask why it’s ranking so poorly, their response is often, “We only do design – you can hire someone else for SEO.”
Lynne on the Zebralove team recently attended a networking event and met a web designer who doesn’t “believe” in SEO. But SEO isn’t a belief system – and a beautiful website is pretty useless if it doesn’t show up in search results.
It’s also important to remember that it’s much easier to build an SEO-friendly website from the start than to try to make it SEO-friendly later. How well a website performs in search can depend on many factors, including the platform or CMS it’s built on – and those aren’t always easy (or even possible) to fix after the fact.
If you’re dealing with this issue now, unfortunately you can’t jump into a time machine and make a different decision. You’ve already paid for the website, and your business likely doesn’t want to or have the resources to start from scratch – so what can you do?
Make sure that Google Analytics and Google Search Console are set up. Google Analytics records information about what traffic you have coming into your website and from where, what they are clicking on, etc. This is important information that can help you make sense of how effective your marketing efforts are and how well you are doing overall on organic search throughout all the search engines. Google Search Console specifically lets you know what keywords you are ranking for in a Google search. It will also let you know if there are any errors that are affecting the website that need to be addressed. Additionally, you can submit a sitemap in Google Console which will help Google find all of your pages and index them.
When you have a website rebuilt, the new site should maintain the same linking structure as your old site had, but this doesn’t always happen. Consequently, the new site will have links that are “broken” and other sites that may be linking to you (which is excellent for SEO as well as business) may also have broken links to your website after your rebuild. Do some research about what links the website has coming in from other websites. If the links are coming into the home page URL you are probably all set, but if they are going to the interior pages, you may want to reach out and see if you can get the page URL updated.
When we rebuild a website we try to keep the linking structure the same if possible, and if it’s not possible, you can add 301 redirects so that the old page automagically gets redirected to the new page’s URL. That helps search engines find the new page and update the link on their end.
Learn more about 301 Redirects
Lastly, make sure the new website has the SEO basics. Fill out meta tags on all of your pages, as well as image alt tags. Make sure your pages are all linked properly, and that there aren’t any broken links on the website. We are always surprised how many websites get launched and still have broken links and lorum ipsum or placeholder text throughout the website.
We also like to create a sitemap page on websites. Sitemaps are basically just a web page with links to every page throughout the website. Search engine bots like site maps a lot so readily index them.
Depending on how bad the situation is, you may need professional assistance. Zebralove Web Solutions helps companies in this kind of position all the time. Please CONTACT US today to discuss your website questions!
We have lots of resources about SEO in our Blog area – Check them out!
Milly has 18 years experience in designing and developing websites, developing apps, and online marketing. She is an expert at driving traffic to websites utilizing SEO strategies and custom digital marketing efforts. Her company, Zebralove Web Solutions offers full service digital marketing and website development. Comprehensive Search Engine Optimization services, and secure web hosting services.
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