When you think about renewing your existing website, what worries you the most?
"After the renewal, traffic won't drop below what we had before... right?"
Isn't that it?
You improve your existing website hoping to attract more traffic and boost sales — but the renewal ends up having the opposite effect. Surely that couldn't happen... except it does. It really does.
You need to be especially careful when you commission the renewal to a new production company.
We'll explain why later; here, let's look at a few checkpoints the person in charge of commissioning a renewal should keep in mind.
A Nightmare! Your Search Rankings Drop After Renewing Your Website?!
It goes without saying that the core of attracting visitors to a website is search on Google, Yahoo! and the like.
If you are highly conscious of online customer acquisition, you are surely always keeping an eye on where your company's website ranks for the search phrases you are targeting. In many cases the motivation is, "It's hard to push our rankings any higher with the current website, so let's redesign it."
And yet, if your rankings drop after the redesign... just thinking about it is terrifying (yikes!).
"Come on, we're hiring professionals, so it'll be fine, right?" you may think.
That's certainly true... or at least it should be.
Even so, there's no harm in knowing in advance the points you should check to make sure that doesn't happen.
That's because these are all things that are hard to notice, and points that a production company rushing to finish tends to carelessly overlook.
Yes... to confess, we too made the same kind of blunder in the past and caused big trouble later on. So the content of this article is our "iron rule" of checks we never skip, so that such a thing never happens again (ha ha).
Three points you should check
- Things related to page structure
- Things related to your website address (URL)
- Things related to meta tags
The order of the points listed here has no particular meaning, but they all share one thing in common: neglecting them can cause your search rankings to drop.
Now, let's go through each of them.
Things related to page structure
Google, which determines search rankings, gives higher evaluations to websites with richer pages and content. In other words, the more pages you have, the more advantageous it is.
With that in mind, one thing to watch out for is that when you review your content again during a redesign, you may end up reducing the number of pages.
Reasons for this include:
* Wouldn't a simpler page structure be better?
* To refine the design, it looks cooler without pages that seem unnecessary
* More pages means higher production costs, so pages were cut to keep the price down
* Other circumstances
and so on.
Certainly, if there are unnecessary pages or services that have already ended, you need to delete them or merge them with other pages. That said, rather than simply cutting the number of pages, you should think carefully: is there a page that could replace it? Is there an explanation that should be added? Is there a way to convey your appeal to users even more clearly?
One more point: if you were running a blog on your previous website, each of those blog posts is also a page. You could even call them valuable assets. Depending on the production company, they may rebuild everything from scratch without migrating them (as if they never existed in the first place). This tends to happen especially when a different website production company from the previous one handles the project. Whether it's technically difficult to migrate them, or they simply regard them as meaningless, we can't say, but it seems they sometimes just skip over them.
Imagine asking a homebuilder to rebuild your house, and they smash all the furniture you'd been using and build a brand-new, completely empty house... picturing it that way may make it easier to understand.
Even if migration is technically difficult, there is always some alternative approach. Even if the production company isn't thrilled about it, this is not a point to concede.
Things related to your website address (URL)
Check whether it differs from the address of your previous website.
Normally, a website address is expressed as something like http://www.○○.com/profile.html. Google, which determines search rankings, checks each page of your website by address and registers the page content. If your previous website had "www" but your new website no longer does... Google may recognize that the website at www.○○.com "no longer exists." It will then recognize ○○.com without "www" as a new website.
So after a certain amount of time passes, the new website will start appearing in search results, but during that interval your search rankings can drop significantly.
Likewise, if your former company profile page profile.html changes to something like company.php, or if you switch to SSL (encryption), which is preferable from a security standpoint, the address changes all the same.
It's better to keep addresses unchanged as much as possible, and when the address inevitably has to change, as with switching to SSL, you can avoid a drop in rankings by putting in place a mechanism that automatically redirects visitors from the old address to the new one.
This area may be hard to understand. In that case, please ask your production company about it.
Things related to meta tags
Besides the parts visible to users, a website has tags that are invisible to users and serve to provide information to search engines.
* Page title
* Description (an introductory text for the page)
are examples. There are others, such as the keywords tag, but these now have almost no meaning in terms of search optimization.
It's a problem if page titles or descriptions are forgotten, or end up completely different from those on your previous website. For example, publishing the "Company Profile" page from your previous website with a work-in-progress title such as "Page 1" still in place.
These are mostly careless mistakes by the production company, but if overlooked they can cause your search rankings to plummet all at once. You need to be careful not to let anything slip through.
When you redesign your website, be sure to check these points without overlooking any of them.
