5 Common SEO Mistakes When Revamping a Website (With Their Solutions)

5 Common SEO Mistakes When Revamping a Website (With Their Solutions)

Redesigning a website is a detailed project with hundreds of steps requiring thought and decision-making at technical, financial, creative, operational, and strategic levels.

Months of planning, designing, writing, and developing are involved before your website is ready for the world.

Knowing this, it helps to avoid mistakes rather than make them.

One key to making sure your launch goes off without a hitch is to ensure your website speaks the language of search engines—or SEO. You need to ensure that any SEO value you’ve built up with your old website is both retained and enhanced on your new website.

Here are five SEO mistakes to avoid to prevent disasters and unnecessary delays in revamping your website.

SEO mistakes

Mistake #1: Redesigning Without Goals

Before you start designing or mapping out content, you need to ask yourself what the primary goals and objectives for the new website are.

If your website intends to generate sales leads, your content and user experience need to align with your conversion paths. Inbound marketing programs rely on this. You generate awareness and therefore leads by increasing traffic. This means high-quality content creation, chiefly in the form of blogs and vlogs, social sharing, and creating reasons to keep people coming back to the website.

Define the ideal customer and your target audience(s). Define the core phases that potential customers experience when deciding to purchase your product.

You will be able to define these key elements by asking what the must-have features and components are that will help you accomplish your goals?

Mistake #2: Not Capturing Analytic Benchmarks

You need to establish metrics based on your old website’s performance. Analytics benchmarks can be found in HubSpot or Google Analytics will assist you in goal setting for the new website.

Benchmarks will include time spent on site, overall visits, and average banner click-through rates: B2B publishers who monetize based on ad revenue are chiefly concerned with these.

Visitors to sales conversions of a certain product is another benchmark to note. A B2C company should waste no time and focus the entire user experience toward this right away.

A service-based organization may be more concerned with lead generation and therefore prefer to spend more effort raising awareness outside of its brand.

From an SEO point of view, to retain link equity and any value you’ve built on your current domain, you should benchmark the following metrics at least:

  • Total traffic (from organic search, referrals, etc.)
  • Conversion rates (ideally each step between traffic and customers)
  • Which pages are getting organic traffic (usually mapped to the best keywords)
  • Usage metrics (geography, bounce rate, time on site, etc.)
  • Inbound links (sites that are linking back to you)

Mistake #3: Choosing the Wrong CMS and Hosting Provider

The right content management system (CMS) is perhaps the single most important factor for a website. Taking the scope of the new site into account, you also have to consider cost, functionality, support, security, reliability, and speed.

To ensure a perfectly optimized website a CMS should have:

Responsive design

Is the website responsive? Can it work seamlessly across any computer, tablet, mobile device, or browser? Google watches for this as an SEO signal.

Functionality

Can you add the right meta tagging or rich schema that search engines use to understand the layout, context, and content of your website?

Analytics

Does the CMS allow you to add analytics functionality or have analytics functionality built in? You need to be able to easily track visits, leads, bounce rates, time on site, and user flows, and build custom reports to answer specific marketing questions.

Support

Do you have access to a support team or an online community if an issue comes up with the CMS? Make sure you know what SMS customer support is going to cost in advance.

Speed

Make sure your website is using an up-to-date CMS with a fast hosting provider, since search engines use site load speed as a ranking factor. HubSpot  has a lightning-fast hosting provider

Mistake #4: Not Submitting a Sitemap and other SEO Mistakes

Every website should submit a sitemap to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. These can be submitted through the respective search engine’s webmaster tools feature. A sitemap shows the URLs for your entire site and helps search engines understand the organization of your website.

And before that, during the web redesign phase, make sure your use redirects properly. Another of the more common SEO mistakes either using 302 (temporary) redirects, or using 301 (permanent) redirects the WRONG way.

If you’re eliminating pages from your old website, you need to redirect your old page to the most relevant new page with similar keywords. This is a much better option than just sending people to your homepage or your blog.

Mistake #5: Not Telling Search Engines About Your Domain Change

You need to tell search engines like Google that your new website is no longer the same. In addition to submitting your new sitemap, use the change of address tool in the Search Console for Google to give them an update.

When submitting your change of address to Google:

  1. Move your content over to the new domain.
  2. Verify Google Search Console on the new domain.
  3. Submit your change of address in Google Search Console.

One More Thing

If you’re not using secure hosting (HTTPS) yet, you need to get with the program. Seriously.

Bad security practices are detrimental to SEO. Search engines will remove your website from their index if your website has been hacked. Make sure your CMS has the right security built in or you are using a security plug-in to avoid this.

Some browsers draw the visitors’ attention to a non-secure warning if your website is not using secured hosting.

As of April 2017, 50% percent of page one search results were on https, so this is the new industry standard. It is important to the website’s ability to rank and to users in general alike.

In summary, when redesigning a website you cannot cut corners and you cannot afford to make SEO mistakes. Every other website designer worth their salt is paying attention to every detail – and you need to do the same.

 

Audit SEO online

What is an SEO Audit?

  • SEO web design is fast becoming a popular keyword searched online. What is SEO?
  • How can SEO help my business reach our goals?
  • Should I invest in learning this or can I trust an expert to do the job?

SEO is a marketing strategy that helps businesses reach customers at the point of their motivated need to find the best products and services.  Imagine being in the right place at the right time. Client is ready to purchase a new car, they hop onto Google and search for something similar to “Best new cars” or “affordable new cars near me”.  Being that purchasing a new car is a large investment, the time to purchase will usually be a longer one. This gives you the opportunity to build a relationship with the searcher who is in the market for your services and products.

 SEO experts

Content creation is a great way to build up trust and product education opportunities.

Having a large website with resources to help the car buyer make sound buying decisions is a great start. Offering reviews, videos, calculators and tips for upkeep and maintenance are great ideas for sharing useful information that helps to build confidence in your companies offerings.

 

Before redesigning the company website or implementing a web design refresh, running a full technical SEO audit will give the marketing team a blueprint or guide to help either the website design company or in house IT team protect current SEO rankings during the site redesign.

Company and Brand Recognition

 best web design company reno nv 350 x 200

How many 5 star reviews do you have? How many are verified through a reputable 3rd party like Google, Facebook or Yelp?

Reviews are not a direct ranking factor, but do affect your rankings through click throughs. When a customer is searching for products and services, they scour the web compiling a list of companies, they then review the ratings of each. So, if you have managed to rank your website #1 in Google, but your competitors have 10 or more positive reviews, you will lose most of the leads to the company with the highest reviews online.

who is the best web design company in reno?

 

Best SEO practices can ensure minimal loss in Google rankings during a site migration and / or site re design.

 

One of the most popular search terms around SEO are:
how to seo your website for free
how to do seo on your website
how to do search engine optimization
how to seo a website 

Although websites in low volume niches are easier to rank in Google for their desired keywords, larger companies who are in very competitive markets need a dedicated expert with experience in out ranking online.  Digital marketing involves a great deal of resources, tools and requirements that change quite a bit. Unless you have ample time to dedicate to learning, testing and acquiring needed information in this market, doing your own SEO could cost you thousands in sales if done incorrectly.

 

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seo audit

Audit SEO | Why you need an audit before and after a site re design

Audit SEO | Why you need an audit before and after a site re design

Company websites are one of the most important pieces to a successful marketing campaign and even business plan. Companies that focus their efforts on creating an engaging experience for their customers online, tend to out perform their competitors.

The look and feel of a custom web design is paramount to  its success, but what lies beneath that branded website, is where SEO audits redirect their focus.

Most of the new SEO auditing services we provide each month, come from new clients who started to lose SEO organic traffic and wanted to know why.

The usual culprit is a site redesign.

A full technical SEO audit shines light onto areas of the new website design that may not be up to par with Google’s SEO requirements. Most of the findings fall along simple and careless changes done by the ad agency or web design company.

SEO audits can take up to two weeks. A full report includes action steps needed in order to correct the issues. After these errors are corrected, we can get a websites rankings back within a few months or less.

Learn more about SEO audits:

How to perform an SEO audit

SEO audit template

SEO audit report sample

SEO audit software

SEO audits

SEO Audit Website

How to audit your website for SEO, PPC & Optimal Conversions/Sales?

Having a fresh set of eyes to review your website, online profiles and marketing efforts can help spot the areas that can dramatically improve the success of your websites marketing efforts.

I would start with the free website review or SEO auditing tools to get an idea of the basic things you can do to set a solid foundation for the success of your website. This can give you a better understanding of how html, css and web code affect your websites ability to rank well in Google search.

Call or text me @ 775-870-0488.  

Learn more about my Full Technical SEO Site Audits here.

website audit tools 2017

Google search console is a free web service that allows you to view some of the keywords that are driving traffic to your website. Why only some? Google recently chose to hide most of the keywords that drive traffic and setting their as unknown in Google Analytics. Although this is very frustrating, you can however view what other keywords and pages on your website that are bringing in clicks. To sign up for Google Search Console, you must have a free email from Gmail.com Click here to learn more.

Website audits can dramatically increase your websites SEO positions and rankings within Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines. Having an SEO Audit Expert review your website property from a technical as well as marketing/conversion rate assessment will greatly increase your SEO’s success rate.

“Most people are spinning their wheels in SEO, hoping to find the next best secret, tip or trick to save their business. While all the while, their poorly develop med website, hosting and design were the real culprits that hindered their online marketing success.”
Sandy Rowley SEO Site Audit Expert.

Our full technical SEO site audit require access to analytical data, so Sandy and her team of audit experts can research trends and opportunities that your SEO efforts are missing out on and how best to capitalize on those items. Most anytime can use a free SEO site auditing tool and gain some valuable insights as to what may be holding their business back online, but most of this information is useless to the average person.

“Sandy is a miracle worker, seriously. After less than 2 months of her SEO repair work, our website has more than doubled our monthly income thanks to her efforts.” Anonymous client with over 2 Million Page Views a month.

“I am in awe of the results. I have worked with so many supposed SEO experts, which of all were a huge mistake. Sandy took our business website, fixed the countless SEO errors and low and behold, our rankings sky rocketed.” Anonymous client with a 20+ year history with Google who was being lead on for many months by an ad agency who claimed to understand technical SEO. After one month of SEO repair work, the clients website is now on page #1 for very competitive industry outranking mega sites like Amazon and others.

“When I read that ‘No one outranks our clients’ on her website, I snickered a little. I thought I would call her to test the waters so to speak. I was blown away. We are now in a full technical SEO audit and her team have sent over a few SEO items to fix immediately. We are already seeing an increase in phone calls to the store.”  Local mechanic who is branching out into other cities in California.

I am happy to offer a quick review of your website for $900. This includes a video with explanations and suggestions as what is needed to increase conversion rates and/or rankings organically. See samples below.

SEO Audit and Website Grade Report for Lake Forest California Parkinson’s Support Group

Website Audit and SEO Review for Parenting Book Author Jean S. Barnes

 

Call or text for your SEO report @ 775-870-0488.