Make This Mistake and Your Website Redesign Project Will Ruin Your Business
Before you embark on a website redesign project with a website designer — consider this or you could potentially ruin your business overnight.
I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen the tears. And I don’t want you to throw away ALL the hard work you’ve put into your website because you ignored this simple step.
Search Engines
Search engines (like Google and Bing) know a lot about your existing website.
They have mapped out your website.
Before you embark on a website redesign project — consider what this means.
They’ve sent their little spiders to crawl all over your website.
And those spiders have reported back.
And the search engines made a map of your website based on those reports.
See it for yourself.
Go to Google now and type in site:domain.co.uk (use your own domain).
See all those pages? (Hopefully there are lots)
If you get a new website — and you don’t consider what I’m about to tell you — you risk having all those pages break or disappear from the search results.
Make a plan or lose business
If you don’t plan for this, you will lose business.
I know you don’t want that.
So here’s the solution.
You’ve either got to:
- make sure your new website has *exactly* the same page URLs (the address of each page) as your current one, OR
- tell the Search Engines that all your pages have moved as soon as you launch your new one.
This is called a Website Migration and it is hugely important.
What is a Website Migration?
You can think of it like setting up a mail redirection service when you move house.
Maybe you’ve changed your domain name?
You need to tell the search engines your new address.
That’s easy enough.
BUT sometimes you’ll only change part of your website.
The moving house analogy falls apart a bit here, so let’s imagine a hotel.
And this fancy hotel has remodelled one of its wings.
And moved the swimming pool.
The swimming pool isn’t where it used to be, so they have to put out new signs.
If it was you wandering around the hotel, sure, you’d find the pool eventually.
Even without the signs.
Because you’re an intelligent human.
Search engines are pretty clever too — eventually, they’d find the new pool.
But you can’t think of the search engine as just one person.
The search engine is responsible for making sure that ALL the guests find the pool.
OK.
Let’s do away with the analogy completely.
If you don’t tell the search engines that you’ve moved your website, or even just moved some of the pages.
The search engine won’t be able to send your customers to the right place.
And you will lose out.
Conclusion
A website redesign project can be completely disastrous for businesses unless Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is considered — in particular, a website migration.
Which is why I’m telling you about this now.
A pretty website isn’t enough.
From the moment we start working together, I’m focussed on the success of your business.
There is no point in redesigning your website if the second we launch it, you lose all of your customers.
I want you to be successful.
So consider SEO.
Prepare for a Website Migration.
Ask about our SEO partner
I’ll get you the help you need to migrate your website successfully — then you can avoid disappearing from all the search engines and losing all of your traffic overnight!