5 (Very) Common SEO Mistakes You May Be Making WhenYou Redesign Your Website by @tomdemers

For most businesses, website redesigns are frequent and for can be a real nightmare. One of themost common issues is that a redesign may improve one aspect of the site (for instance the designmight be better, the conversion might be stronger, your messaging and branding may be tighter)while weakening another (you might see a steep drop in SEO traffic). The concept of incorporatingSEO into your redesign before you update your site is something SEOs and online marketers havebeen preaching for years, and there are a lot of great resources, including:

Despite all that information and the emphasis many authors have placed on considering SEO inredesigning your site, there are still many businesses losing traffic post-redesign. In this post I wantto walk through five specific mistakes I still see companies make when redesigning their Websites,as well as how to avoid them.

1. Your Dev Site is Indexed or Your Main Site Isn't

Don't let this be you!

This is a fairly easy one to diagnose and fix, but it still happens more frequently than one mightthink.

In the case of a dev version of your site, you want to make sure that content is explicitly blockedfrom appearing in Google's index. The reason for this is that despite your best efforts, it's notuncommon for the live version of your site to have a link or two that point to the dev version ofspecific pages on your site (even if everyone is aware of this being a potential issue, people still

sometimes make mistakes). There are actually two fairly simple methodologies for ensuring yourdev site won't show up in search engines:

But once you've blocked the dev version of your site, it's extremely important to make sure you don'tblock the main version of your site: you need to be sure to remove the nofollow meta tag from thecode you're transferring to your main domain if noindex was the solution you were utilizing. If youdid this for your whole site, you'll likely notice it right away, but I've seen sites make this mistakeonly for a subsection of their site and then wonder why a specific subdomain or their blog suddenlyhad organic traffic fall off a cliff.

2. Your Analytics Isn't Installed Properly

This is more of a general marketing and analytics issue, but you'll also want to be careful that you'reinstalling your analytics code properly as you redesign your site. A few mistakes to avoid regardingyour analytics code:

Creating a New Profile - In Google Analytics and many analytics providers creating a new profile fora new site will erase your historical site data and frequently causes significant issues in historicaltracking.

Mishandling New Subdomains - If you're introducing new subdomains (or your first non-wwwsubdomain) you'll want to be sure you're tracking subdomains

Check for the Code - You'll also want to make sure that the code gets carried over to the new site -beyond just checking your source code to make sure Google Analytics is installed, you can also useScreaming Frog to crawl your site and check for missing GA code or use a tool like GA checker andto spot check specific pages for issues you can use Google's handy tag assistant plugin

As with other activities on your site, if you're no longer able to accurately track SEO traffic and goalsyou'll be severely hampered in your organic search activities.

3. You Inadvertently Changed Your Link Structure and URLs

This is a major issue that frequently gets overlooked in site redesigns. Changing your URLs or URLstructure might mean:

Moving content from a subfolder to a subdomain (or vise-versa) such as content from

http://www.example.com/old-subfolder to http://newsubdomain.example.com

Changing the name of a subfolder, such as http://www.example.com/old-subfolder/random-page tohttp://www.example.com/new-subfolder-name/random-page

Changing the actual page slug in the URL, such as: http://www.example.com/p23432 tohttp://www.example.com/new-cleaner-url

Some things to keep in mind regarding a change in URLs:

If you don't absolutely need to change your URL structure (for strong functionality and/or usabilityreasons) it's probably best to keep your URL structure as-is.

Identify pages with link equity pointed at them (using tools like Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, orMajestic SEO) and where possible and where there's a relevant page to redirect those pages to besure to implement permanent 301 redirects to appropriate pages.

Subfolders are generally considered preferable to subdomains for SEO, when possible, but becareful to implement any content migration properly.

Create a great 404 page with links to relevant information and follow SEO best practices regarding404s and HTTP status codes in general.

This is an issue that can really cost you significant traffic from search for an extended period of time,so Websites should be very careful in moving to different URL structures.

4. You're Using New Code and New Features

Another issue sites can run into is when they introduce new features to their sites and don't considerSEO - a common (and relatively well-known) version of this would be hiding content that hadpreviously been static HTML behind JavaScript and AJAX. There are often valid reasons you mightwant to introduce AJAX into your site's functionality, but you'll want to be aware of Google'srecommended implementation, alternatives for the same functionality, and the overall impact ofdifferent functionality on your search traffic. Beyond AJAX, you might also inadvertently:

Trap your site's crawlable text in images for design reasons

Change your site's pagination, which can cause SEO issues

Change your site's title tag structure or blowing up unique title tags and meta descriptions for entiresections of your site

Increase your page's load time and slow down your pages - this is obviously an important usabilityand conversion optimization factor as well. You can check for page speed issues with Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

Negatively impact mobile page speed or mobile usability for your site - you can use the Page Speedtool for specific mobile insights and Google's mobile friendliness tool to check for mobile usabilityissues (but beware data inconsistencies there).

In some of these instances you may just decide that the improved functionality is worth a dip insearch traffic, but understanding the potential impact on your site's traffic (identify the pages thenew functionality impacts and the traffic those pages are getting from search) will help you make aninformed decision on how to implement new features (and in most cases you'll be able to implementthe functionality you want in an SEO-friendly way).

5. Your Messaging No Longer Aligns With Your Keyword Strategy

A final issue with site redesigns that frequently have a negative impact on SEO results is when thesite's content changes to fit new messaging, and leaves a previously effective keyword strategybehind. Again, in some of these instances you may ultimately determine that more effectivemessaging is more valuable for your business than targeting specific terms you had previouslytargeted, but the key here is to understand the impact changes to title tags and on-page content canhave on your site's search traffic.

On this front, you can look for the pages and sections of the site driving the most traffic from searchand also use a wireframe (even a simple spreadsheet) detailing changes to content so that everyoneinvolved (including internal or external SEO resources) understands the changes being made to thesite.

The Takeaway

In all these instances the intention behind the changes is to help improve your site in some capacity -the trick is knowing what changes to your site may be weakening your ability to rank in search, andcoming up with strategies to mitigate any potential SEO risks involved with your redesign.

Screenshots taken 3/13/2015 of www.google.com.

Tom is the co-founder and managing partner of Measured SEM and Cornerstone Content. He wasalso the former Director of Marketing for WordStream, Inc. Prior to working at WordStream, he wasan in-house SEO specialist and SEO Manager, worked as an SEO consultant for a search enginemarketing agency, and had done independent organic and paid search engine marketing consultingfor numerous clients for several years.

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