Let’s say you’ve decided it’s time to redo your website. The design you’re currently using is more than a decade old and it shows. You’ve made room in the budget to hire a professional web designer and developer, you tell them what you want, and they get to work.
When they finally show you what they’ve done you’re ecstatic! You love it! You put them in contact with your web team so they can help move everything over. Someone asks if your SEO strategist should be involved in the transition.
“No,” you say. “Why would they need to know?”
So they go ahead and set up your fancy new website.
A week later, you get a call from your SEO strategist. “Your website traffic dropped last week and it hasn’t recovered. There’s no Google update happening at the moment, and I don’t see anyone else in the SEO forums talking about issues with the websites they manage. Did you guys change something?”
“We changed the website, but how could that cause a problem?”
There’s silence from the other end of the line before you hear your SEO strategist say, “That can cause a lot of problems if they don’t know anything about SEO. You did ask about their SEO qualifications, didn’t you?”
If you did not ask about their SEO qualifications and you find yourself in this situation, all is not lost. Despite the old saying that nothing dies on the internet, the fact is that lots of things die on the internet every day and you can absolutely recover your rankings, but it will take time and effort.
Hopefully, you have not yet found yourself in this situation. If that’s the case, I’d like to talk about what you can do to avoid finding yourself in this situation. First, let’s talk about why SEO and web design are inextricably linked.
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Your Website IS Your SEO Strategy
There’s no denying that there are a lot of components to your SEO strategy, many of which I’ve covered in other posts on this blog. But at the end of the day, the goal is to get your website to rank for relevant searches. Yes, that means making sure you have great content that answers your audience’s questions. But it also means making sure the website loads quickly, is easy to navigate, has all the right meta tags in all the right places, etc.
Unfortunately, not every web designer/developer is familiar with SEO. Many of them will say they make SEO-friendly websites just because they know it’s what the prospect wants to hear. In reality, they have no idea how to create websites that rank for relevant searches.
So how can you make sure you’re hiring a web designer who really does know about SEO instead of one who just says they know about SEO?
My first tip is to include your SEO strategist on the calls when you’re interviewing web designers. Your SEO strategist will know the right questions to ask to determine their level of SEO knowledge.
If you don’t have an SEO strategist on your team, or if they’re not available for your interviews, here are some questions you can ask.
How Do You Deal with Redirects?
A redirect is a piece of code on a web page that orders any browser looking for that URL to go to a different URL. This happens a lot when people change the name of their business or their website, but they want to keep their old content. You can put a redirect onto the old URL so that if someone types the old URL into their browser or clicks on a link for the old URL, instead of getting an error page, they’ll go straight to the new URL without even realizing they were redirected from one URL to another.
A redirect ensures people are still able to find your site, which is critical. Few things are more frustrating than clicking on a link or typing in a URL that gets you an error page. People who experience that are more inclined to find another website where they can easily find what they need, rather than clicking around trying to find your website.
So, when you’re interviewing web developers, ask if they’re planning to keep the old URLs or update to new URLs. If you are planning on changing the name of your company or website, you’ll definitely want to update the URLs accordingly, which means you’ll need to make sure your web developer is including redirects.
But don’t take their word for it. Check links to your old website to make sure they redirect to the new website. If they don’t and your web developer is nowhere to be found, it’s time to start the process of looking for a new web developer who can help you with that. Depending on your SEO strategist’s level of coding knowledge, they might even be able to take care of those redirects for you.
How Do You Manage Page Load Speed?
Web designers are only human and sometimes they can get a little carried away in their efforts to make your new website look really cool. The problem with websites that look really cool is they can sometimes take forever to load. On average, people click away if something takes more than 3 seconds to load.
I’m not saying this means you can’t have a website that looks awesome. You can absolutely have your cake and eat it too, but sometimes you might need to use smaller images, fewer images and videos, or shorter videos to make sure your website loads right away.
Once you’ve established that your new web designer can make an awesome website that perfectly reflects your brand, make sure they also have a strategy for managing the load speed so you don’t lose prospects who are trying to find out more about you.
Will It Be Mobile Friendly?
By now, every web developer should be making sure all the websites they design are mobile friendly, but it’s always a good idea to ask this question, just in case.
People are using their phones as computers more than ever, so if they can’t see or navigate your website from their phone, they’re going to be more likely to find someone with a website that is mobile friendly.
Once you have your new website up and running, I suggest visiting it from your laptop/desktop, as well as a mobile device to make sure it’s as appealing and as easy to read and navigate on mobile devices as it is on laptops and desktops.
How Will You Make Sure It’s Easy to Read?
This is a conversation you want to include your content strategist on if at all possible, because the layout of your content matters as much as the content itself. After all, it doesn’t matter how good or convincing the content is if no one reads it because all they saw when they came to the website was a giant block of text, which sent them running for the hills.
Breaking your content up into sections prevents people from getting overwhelmed and clicking away. It also makes it easier for them to skim so they can find what they need quickly and easily.
With that in mind, ask your web designer about their ideas for content layout and how they intend to make your content as visually appealing and easy to navigate as possible. For that, you’ll definitely want them to talk to your content strategist and not just in the interview. They should work closely together throughout the process so your content strategist has an idea of which pieces of content are going where, and how much space they have for each section.
Check Your Performance
Whether you track your website’s performance yourself or you leave that to your SEO strategist, make sure you check to see how the website performs after all the updates have been installed. Some initial wobbling in the rankings is to be expected, especially if you changed the URL. But if your rankings or traffic take a sudden nosedive and don’t recover, take a look at your Google Analytics to see what could be causing the problem. Does the website take too long to load? Is the content not engaging enough? Is it hard to navigate?
Finding the answers to these questions can be easier said than done. It’s one thing to have a Google Analytics account. It’s another thing to interpret the data so you can understand what it’s saying about how people are interacting with (or opting out of) your website.
Whether you’ve recently redone your website, are thinking about redoing your website, or just aren’t getting the right traffic to your website, we can help. A great place to start is an SEO audit, especially if it’s been a while since your last SEO audit.
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