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79 Lichfield StreetIt’s not just Google’s latest algorithm mixing it up for your search engine optimization.
Other changes that can cause your search rankings to dip are:
There are ways to mitigate your risk, to ensure that you experience very little dip in your organic search traffic, and that undesirable side effects of these changes are short-term,
The two changes that have the biggest potential SEO impact are a site redesign and a domain name change.
Our TimeZoneOne search team will talk you through some tactics to manage your search engine presence as you make these changes.
When you redesign your website, elements search engines use to determine the relevance and authority of your web pages may change.
Changing the way people navigate around your website can dramatically alter the way search engines access pages and index your site.
Changes to your site structure also influence the transfer of link equity to your new site. Link equity, or link juice, is the ranking Google awards your site based on the quality and quantity of links to your website.
An inbound-link to your website from a major international news organisation like Al Jazeera, will rank highly, indicating to Google that your site has high quality content. Link equity is an important component of SEO and a major contributor towards your organic search rankings. You want to be sure that your link equity transfers to your new site.
Content has a major impact on your search engine equity. You may move, rework, or delete content contributing to your organic search authority during the redesign process.
Search engines then need time to re-scan your new website, and either index your updated content for key search topics, or find new relevant content instead.
If you replace written content with images, video or other visual content, you may find your website loses more organic traction, as search engines have less information to index.
Changing your domain name can be a risky business. We recommend you have a strong business case to change your domain name, strong enough that you’re willing to accept some organic search losses along the way. Changing your domain name can be as simple as changing the TLD at the end, for example changing from .co.nz to .com. Or you could change your whole domain name, for example changing www.timezoneone.com to www.tzo-chch-agency.co.nz.
As far as search engines are concerned, changing your domain name means you’re starting a brand new website, even if the content is all exactly the same. New domain names take time to develop traction. Search engines have to re-crawl your site, re-index all your pages and content from scratch. You’ll likely experience at least a temporary SEO hit, possibly even a permanent effect, even if you do everything correctly.
The most important thing is to carry out your 301 redirects properly. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect, telling search engines that the content that used to be on your old site, is now over here on your new site. A 301 redirect usually transfers 90-99% of link equity to your new domain (however this is not guaranteed). In addition, if you have a lot of back links from other websites to your site, there might be some loss in link equity with the domain change.
Steps to Minimize the Impact of a Domain Name Change
We're always redeveloping websites that attract substantial organic traffic. Maintaining search engine equity is crucial, and the development of a content and search strategy is an important part of our partnership with clients.
Let us tell you a little cautionary tale that prompted us to write this article. Over the last six months or so, a few organizations we used to manage websites for, built new sites with new agencies. It happens. We wished them well, they went on their merry way. It was all very amicable. Then they launched their new sites. They looked lovely. But looking lovely and delivering results can be two different things. We still managed marketing access to their sites, and we could see the new sites were hemorrhaging organic traffic, because the steps outlined above, particularly redirects, had not taken place. In several cases traffic dropped by more than 50%. We sent a few awkward emails, along the lines of: “It’s not really our place, but have you noticed …’
It’s easy to sound smug here, but we empathize. Websites are complex. The list of things to consider can feel endless. We’d be the first to put our hand up and say sometimes we drop the ball. But with organic search so fundamental to your digital marketing success, you need a plan to maintain your search engine equity when you make changes to your site. Imagine the business impact of losing 50% of your traffic.
If you need advice on how to keep your search engine equity when you update your site, contact our talented team of web developers and digital marketers.
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