As any business owner with a website knows, your website will need to be redesigned/revamped from time to time to keep it fresh and appealing to your target audience.
Additionally, as technology changes over time, it is best that your website gets updated to stay ahead of, or at least keep up with, these technological advances.
So, when the time has come to completely redesign your website, it is important that whomever you hire, really knows what they are doing.
That means hiring a web design and development company who can explain to you how they will redesign and rebuild your website without hurting the Google search engine rankings you may have achieved to date.
Hire the wrong web design and development company, and your organic search rankings can take a dramatic nose dive. And if that happens, be prepared for a significant drop in traffic to your website, which can cause you irreparable harm via a potentially sharp reduction in new business. And no business owner wants to experience that.
So, should you be worried and postpone a website redesign? No.
As mentioned earlier, it is important that you hire the right people to redesign your website correctly, as there are a number of things a competent web design and development company can do to mitigate the SEO risks from a redesign of your website.
Outdated Content
Outdated content is any information within your website pages that is no longer relevant to what services or products you currently offer or is otherwise low quality content (spammy).
Some examples of outdated content could be:
- Discontinued product or services
- Time-sensitive content, such as past sales discounted offers
- Ex-employee information
Outdated content is not content that was written years ago, but is still very relevant to what you do.
For example, our website offers custom WordPress theme development services, which initially was written years ago. The information regarding this topic is still relevant to what we do, so it is valuable and would not be deleted in a redesign. That is not to say that we shouldn’t add to it over time, or discuss new trends in WordPress theme design via blog posts.
On the other hand, let’s say we no longer offer logo design services, then it would make sense to remove that information from our website in an upcoming redesign. Fortunately for us, we do still offer logo design.
Anyway, you get the idea.
Dummy Text
Some web designers/developers will use “dummy text” in their redesigns either intentionally as placeholders or it came from your a “template” or “demo” theme they are using. Either way, sometimes, that dummy content is accidentally left in some of your redesigned website pages…ugh, not good for SEO!
What is Dummy Text?
Dummy text is text content that is used in the web design industry to fill the space of a text element within a web page, as a placeholder, until the “actual” text content specific to the client, can be written and used instead. Usually, dummy text for web pages look something like this: “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.”
Thus, the point here is that sloppy or lazy so called “web designers” may leave dummy text in your newly redesigned website pages, which is never good for Google or any search engine rankings.
404 Errors
We have written an article about common website errors, one of which is the The 404 Page Not Found Error.
This type of error occurs when a web page can no longer be found. When a website undergoes a redesign, sometimes, the web page URL will be changed (perhaps to be more keyword relevant to the topic of a particular web page. So, for example, the old web page may have been /repairs/ while the new URL for that web page will now be renamed to /heating-system-repairs/. Thus, if a 301 redirect is not set up, you could end up with a number of 404 Errors, which can hurt your Google rankings as well as increase your bounce rate.
301 Redirects
The common problem that arises is upon launching a newly redesigned website, the web design/development company forgets or fails to set up a permanent redirect to notify Google and other search engines, as well as web visitors, that the old web page URL has now been “permanently” changed to another URL. This protocol is called a “301 Redirect”. This could also impact your backlinks if they are linking to a web page based on an old URL that no longer exists and there are no 301 redirects set up, this will be detrimental to your SEO.
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