EP15: Protecting Your Website’s SEO in a Redesign

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Podcast Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to SEObits, the podcast that helps smart business owners jumpstart their SEO strategy. Tune in each week for fresh SEO insights and actionable tips that will help you improve your site’s SEO one bit at a time. Now, here’s your host, SEO Trainer and Consultant, Rebecca Gill.

Rebecca Gill:

Welcome back to another episode of SEObits. Today, I’d like to talk about redesigning websites and how to protect your SEO.

Now, a few weeks ago, I had a sales call with a gentleman named Scott. He is a small business owner and he is getting ready to redesign his website because it is about 4 years old and looks like it’s 10 years old. So he knows it’s time.

And he is worried about protecting his SEO. And he asked me on the call, what does he have to worry about and things like that? And as soon as he was saying this, I’m thinking to myself, “OK. This would be a great topic for discussion be it a blog post or a podcast episode or maybe a checklist that I can provide to people.”

So I wanted to take an opportunity to do this because I think it’s important that both developers and end users and web owners understand what is important when redesigning your website. What do you have to do to protect your existing SEO and make improvements as you move forward? It is important because there have been tons of cases where websites are redesigned and launched and the wrong things are done or forgotten and companies completely lose their existing SEO. The traffic will not just have a dip, it will plummet and it will just disappear.

So I want to make sure that we prevent that and we talk about that in one of our episodes. So a good checklist is going to blend a number of things together, both planning and protection of the website as well as things like content creation and technical SEO.

So, let’s walk through some of the things that we need to worry about when we are considering a redesign. One of the first things is setting up a development website. So a lot of times what happens is you’re not going to take down your existing website while you’re working on the new one.

So you or your developer is going to have either a secondary website created or a staging environment. And if you’re working with someone like WP Engine or Liquid Web who I host with, they both have wonderful staging environments that you can use that’s completely separate from your website. This will allow you to bring in a new template or a theme, change content, just completely overhaul it while keeping your existing website intact.

The key to this in protecting what you’ve got going on with search is when you create that development website, you need to make sure that it is set to no follow and no index. It’s really important that this is done. And that is so the search engines aren’t seeing a combination of the live site and the development site because if they do and they eventually will find it, that development site will come into the Google search index. Your prospective visitors are going to find that content so they will be going to a site that’s half-done. It’s like a half-baked site.

But more importantly, Google is going to see duplicate content out there. If you’ve got a large site and it’s not protected and not blocked from the search engines, the search engines will index this and it will degrade the SEO value of your live site because it’s all this duplicate content out there, and we don’t want that to happen.

It is a very quick fix in WordPress. You can select block search engines from the dev site with lots of hosting accounts. You can do this as well. You can put up a barrier whether it would be additional login prompt at the server level to do this to protect it or you can also put it in a plugin like a coming soon plugin that will block traffic and it will only allow access to the site if you have a user ID and a password.

So there are a number of different ways to do that. But it is important and it does need to absolutely be done. So that’s the first thing that we want to talk about.

The next thing we want to talk about is content planning. If you are going to be revamping your website and you’re going to be modifying your content, you need to think about the current state of your website like what pages and posts and architecture you have as well as the future instance and what is going to be moving forward.

Don’t just start adding content into the site. Start thinking about content silos and the relationship of one piece of content to another. And to really be able to do this well, you need to understand the type of content that you have existing. And if your website is large, this is a big task.

How do you really see a good full picture of your website? Well, I love to use a tool called a DYNO Mapper. It is paid tool. I am not an affiliate for this. I don’t get money by mentioning it. I just really love this tool and I use it all the time. I use it for both web design clients that we have as well as SEO clients that we have. And I use it for my own sites when I go to redo something or like redesign it and revamp it.

So DYNO Mapper will go out and crawl your entire website and it will produce sitemaps online that you can view them visually in multiple different presentations and then you can export all that content over to an Excel file that will give you every single piece of content, the URL, the title, things like meta titles, meta descriptions, amount of content. But it’s a really great tool to give you an audit of what you have. That way, you can kind of go clean out some dead stuff and get rid of the old stuff and make sure that you’re paying attention to the stuff that’s there that you need to keep track of and improve upon as you Go Live with the new site.

So, two other tools that I use to investigate the site is Google Search Console and then SEMrush. And I like to look at those because both of them will provide a list of your top pages and your top keyword phrases.

Now, Google Search Console is a free tool and you have to have your website connected to it where SEMrush is a paid service. Now, I am an affiliate for them because I truly believe in their products. So me mentioning it doesn’t necessarily give me revenue but I just like to throw that out there.

I am an affiliate for them because I believe in them and I use them daily. So SEMrush goes out and crawls all of your website and it will bring back exactly like a list of top pages and top keywords. But unlike DYNO Mapper or unlike Google Search Console, SEMrush will give you a list of those top pages and will show you exactly what phrases are ranking for it. So if you have a page where you’re ranking for 50 phrases, it will combine those and connect those for you.

So, if you’re changing that page, the content, the visual, the structure of it, you can look at where you’re ranking and protect it. So if you’re ranking very high for a keyword phrase and you want to keep that keyword phrase, you need to make sure that your new content includes that keyword phrase. It seems like basic but it’s something that’s always overlooked. And so, that’s a great tool for that and that’s why I use it and that’s why I recommend it.

The other thing I use it for is competitor research because it’s just a wonderful tool for figuring out what’s ranking with your competitors because you might want to kind of include some of their tactics in your new site.

So I love those two tools, really good for protecting the individual keyword phrases and your top pages when you go to relaunch. I always encourage people to map their focused keywords and their URLs together as they’re doing and SEO project or they’re making changes to their site. And these tools will help you do that.

So, another thing with content planning is to make sure that you are really creating solid content silos so both users and visitors can figure out the nature of your content and how it interacts with each and kind of get topical areas. It’s important to the search engines and it really helps users as well.

If you’re not familiar with a content silo, I do have information out there for you and I will make sure that I link to this in the show notes. It’s a great tool for SEO. Once people understand what a content silo is, they can’t understand why they weren’t using them in the past. And it’s just – you have to be aware of something and understand what it is to make use of it. And that’s my goal with this podcast. So, I would not go through content silos today but I’ll provide information on it in the notes.

So the next thing is let’s talk about content. As you go to revamp your pages and this is really with design too. You need to be cognizant of the content that you have currently like the level and the depth of that content, how many words are actually on that page, how elaborate is it, how in-depth, and you need to make sure if you’re creating new design templates that you don’t take away from that. And that’s one thing that I’ve seen designers do without realizing they are doing it.

As design shifts changed, things can go to a minimalistic environments where there’s a lot of whitespace, there’s a lot less words. Well, if you are ranking on a page and let’s say, this one could have like a hundred different phrases that it’s ranking on well on Google and it has 2,000 words on it and it goes into in-depth information, now you’re designer has completely changed the design of this and has given you this fresh new look and it’s beautiful and it has got lots of images but they brought you down to 200 words.

So what’s going to happen to that in the eyes of the search engines? In most cases, they’re going to struggle with it and you’re going to lose keyword ranking because that content is no longer there. It doesn’t exist. So that’s something that you really want to be aware of.

What is the length and the depth of your existing content and if you are making style and design changes? You need to validate that you’re keeping that somewhat uniformed. There can be some changes but don’t drop it drastically because you’ll find yourself in trouble.

I like to have new content between if this is a really focused page for keywords, it needs to be between 1,500 and 2,000 words because most of the stuff ranking on page one is there. Most of the stuff ranking on page one right now has about 1,700 words on it. So keep that in mind.

And as you write your content, you want to proofread for spelling and grammatical errors, readability, make sure that you’ve got proper meta titles and descriptions. And your eyes are probably glassy because I’m giving you all of these things. But don’t worry. I’m going to have a checklist that you can download and print off and utilize for your projects moving forward.

So, we’ve talked about preparing your dev site or your staging environment. We’ve talked about some things you can do with content planning. We’ve talked about things to be cognizant of with content creation.

Now, let’s talk about the technical aspects of it. So technical SEO is such a huge part of today’s SEO and you can’t have a solid SEO strategy without it. Something that I felt like we never talked about 10 years ago but it’s a huge focus now.

What things have to be considered when you’re looking at that revamp and that relaunch? And if you’re an end user, you need to make sure your developer has this all in check. And if you’re a developer, you need to make sure you have this in check for your clients. It’s important for both of you.

So you need to make sure that your header usage has a strong outline structure. I know with HTML5, you can put H1 throughout the whole page if you want. Well, guess what? That does not provide structure for the search engines. The search engines are looking for an outline of the page. When you have one H1 to start with and then some H2s and H3s, you’re giving the search engines a roadmap of that page, what it is, and you’re laying it out just like you would lay out a story or an outline. That’s what those headers do. And you need to make sure that the template code supports that.

And then you need to make sure as you write the content, it is utilizing it properly. And it really helps to reinforce the topic of the page and the focus of the page.

Responsive design is another area of technical SEO that you have to be very, very cognizant of and careful to protect.

In 2018, Google is moving to that mobile-first index. It was supposed to be this year in 2017 but they’re pushed it back. They want one website with one set of URLs in one structure and they need it to be responsive. And your responsive website has to be spot on for mobile.

Do you need any mobile first website design? Well, no, not really. But you need to make sure that your website creates a wonderful experience for both desktop and mobile users.

And if you don’t have a mobile website, you need to get one before 2018 because you’re going to struggle with the SEO if you don’t.

Another thing that we always do at Web Savvy and I encourage others to do is to validate your template code with the W3 standards and they’ve got a tool that you can do that with. It’s a great tool. This validates that there’s not gobbledygook in your code. And you’re probably asking yourself what does that matter with SEO? It does because the search engines understand code and they run through the code and they need it to make sense to them. So you want to prevent confusion for them which means getting rid of any errors.

You’d like to make sure that the text to code ratio on your pages and your posts is solid so that when a search engine comes to a page, it doesn’t see 80% and 20% content. I do see that sometimes and it makes it difficult for me to digest the page which means it will it difficult for a search engine to digest the page as well. So you just want to keep a good balance there.

The next item is schema and structured data. No matter what type of content you have, you want to make sure that you have a good structured data in place. This will be for local geographical coverage. It could be for podcasts or movies or recipes for cooking. There’s a lot of different schema that supports structured data.

What does that structured data do? It simply helps the search engines better understand your content. It’s code to say, “Here’s my content but here’s how to use my content.” There’s a lot of plugins for WordPress that support this. There is code. If you’re not using WordPress, there’s code that you can actually add to your pages and posts to help create that structured data. But it’s definitely worth doing and taking the time to implement.

Alt Text on images is very important for both usability as well as the search engines. It helps the search engines understand what that image is about and it helps screen readers to describe that image to those who can’t see it.

And I know people will fight with me on that. It just makes me angry because you’re doing good for humans, not just search engines by having good Alt Text. Don’t cram full of keyword phrases because that’s not usually what the image is about. The Alt Text needs to describe the image. Period.

You want to optimize your images for low time so that they’re not really heavy and bug down the site. That tends to happen especially with end users because they forget about it. My team kind of nags me about it themselves because it’s something I forget. I just upload an image and I forget that it’s huge and I should have reduced it before I uploaded it because I’ve got to be again, aware of and focused on that mobile experience and good performance.

Internal linking and how one page or post connects to each other is also something to make sure that you’re checking on. The search engines use those internal links to figure out the most important pages so you want to make sure that your linking structure has purpose. Again, that could be a whole blog post or a whole podcast episode on its own. But it’s a check mark that you need to go through.

A very big one and one I’m constantly getting notified from people as they didn’t get it done is 301 redirects. If you’ve ever done a relaunch and you completely lost your SEO, the chances are, your developer or yourself did not put in 301 redirects. They need to be created manually by you so it has got some intelligence along with the process flow and the direction they’re taking. It needs to be uploaded and available at Go Live. You can’t do this a week later or a month later because the search engines could have already crawled the site and de-indexed the content.

If you don’t have 301 redirects in place, you’re going to lose your existing SEO. If you have a good 301 redirects structure in place for any URL changes or content changes, you’ll preserve like 98% of your SEO and that redesign.

OK. The next guys are an XML sitemap. It needs to be regenerated. It needs to be uploaded to Google and Bing to make sure that they have that new content available to them and they have basically a roadmap of what content you have on your site and it buckets it up if you have a good XML plugin in place.

I like the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. That’s what I use for my XLM sitemap. It’s definitely the benchmark if you’re using WordPress.

And then the last guy is the robots file which basically tells the search engines what they can and cannot access.

So those are all the technical SEO things that you need to remember.

Now, let’s talk about Go Live. When you go to take your site into a live environment, something that you need to remember is the development site and the staging site, if you’re going to transfer the whole thing over, it’s currently set to no follow, no index. You have to check that away. So that way, you’re telling the search engines when they hit your URLs to not go anywhere of it and don’t put it into the index. And that’s the problem. I see a lot of people forget that.

OK. Make sure that your Google Analytics goals if you have any in place, which by the way you should, they need to be reviewed to make sure that the URL structure didn’t change and those goals are still in place so that you can really see what’s working on your website and where that traffic is coming from that’s converting. This gives you where to focus your attention. So that needs to be done.

Again, after Go Live, that XML sitemap needs to get pushed up to Google and Bing and validated. You need to check Google Search Console to make sure that you have no errors showing. And then it doesn’t hurt to go back through DYNO Mapper and have DYNO Mapper recrawl your site to make sure it doesn’t find any errors. So, that’s a lot, right? I know it’s a lot. But in the end it’s really worth it.

So here are two things. If you’re an end user and you do DIY website management which I love, good for you, power on, you need to make sure you’re checking through this list. There’s so much more that’s out there that can help or hurt you that you’re probably aware of. So take the time, grab the download, make sure that you have it available.

If you’re a developer or an agency and you’re not going through this list, you need to start going through this list. You need to prepare and protect your client during this relaunch process. So I welcome you to download the list too and make sure that it becomes part of your project management process with your development and your re-launches.

So, those are all some great tips and some great examples and there are so many countless real world experiences and stories that I have of just this all going bad and that’s why I did want to produce something that was tangible for people to take away as well as talk through it.

I’ve literally been hired as what I call an SEO advocate for a company who hired a large organization in New York to rebuild their site. I think they paid like 80 grand for the site and there was no SEO and they were going to lose all of their existing SEO because the SEO just wasn’t part of the project.

So, I didn’t do any of the development but I did come in as an advocate and we worked through this list to make sure that all of this was getting done along that process. That’s just one extreme case. But there are many others. I mean there are countless others.

Don’t fall into that trap. Protect yourself if you’re an end user. And if you’re a developer, protect your client. Make sure that you are considering SEO before the relaunch starts to happen, during the planning, and the execution process and then again at Go Live to make sure that the process is as smooth as possible and you are not only protecting your existing SEO but you’re helping push that SEO forward and making advancements with the new content and the new site.

OK. I will have all of this information available in the show notes at SEObits.fm. I thank you for joining me today and I look forward to chatting with you next week as we continue our SEO journey together.