Site Redesign - Regaining Rankings
-
We just finished designing a whole new site that will hopefully convert better than our previous site and we are currently coding it. We are hoping to get the site out in the next month or two (or three!). We want to know what to expect in regard to our sales from SEO.
If you successfully launched a site redesign and your conversion rate improved, can you answer this question? How long will it take for my rankings to regain their initial ranking and then hopefully rank even higher?
-
I really liked it. It worked great for the company where I worked previously as an in-house SEO. We would be using it where I am now for a new niche business we built, however, Volusion's platform, at this time, is not capable of accurately calculating sales tax. If Congress passes the Main Street tax for Web site e-commerce, Volusion's platform will need to catch up and be capable of calculating sales taz accurately across all 50 states, or their business will be in trouble.
For the niche site here, we selected 3dcart because it integrates with Avalara Avatax, which is a great (but fairly pricey) service that automatically and accuralte calculates sales tax for difficult states like California and Washington.
However, 3dcart has some serious limitations and the backend is not nealy as intuitive as Volusion's. Merchandising on 3dcart, particularly bundled products is pretty much a messy nightmare. Volusion is much nicer. Volusion also has a nicer way of organizing all the backend content, including design elements. 3dcart is very disjunct in terms of how design elements are orgnized for editing in the back end.
As far as SEO goes, I think they are both fine. Perhaps 3DCart might have a tiny bit of an edge because it does allow you the ability to 100% customize your URLs.
Hope that's good food for thought!
Dana
-
Now that you have been on Volusion for a bit - what are your thoughts? - I know this is off topic but I have been considering trying it out...
-
I agree with Billy completely and I have also been in a scenario where a complete platform change and redesign took place. In our case, we did see a drastic reduction in traffic and rankings, but this was due to developers not properly handling 301-redirects. Once those were set in place it took about 6 weeks to recover. After that the site converted twice as well as the old one and traffic increased about 25%. Rankings improved astronomically. Just for reference we moved from BV4 (in-house) to Volusion (hosted).
Good luck! I hope it goes swimmingly!
Dana
-
We have completed redesigns like what you have described (in your responses as well as your original post) and for one in particular - even with far better optimization in place after the redesign we had some rankings drop for a couple of weeks before rankings not only returned but improved over what they had been. It was like the redesign was so drastic that Google pushed us back just to see what was going on - although I chalked it up to being the amount of time it probably took for all of the redirects to be recognized...
-
Your dead right on that! We are basically switching everything. We currently use a custom php shopping cart and we are switching to magento. Like I replied to EGOL we are creating an entire new navigation with many new urls and and entirely new funnel from entry through checkout.
This is our current site http://www.plasticplace.net/
This is our future home page: http://i.imgur.com/zK0lUEq.jpg
-
Not a redesign, pretty much a huge transition. As EGOL mentioned, you will need redirects to pass on the link juice for EVERY SINGLE PAGE.
And the power of each individual page will change as well. Example your link juice was 100 and spread to 50 pages. Your new site will have 100 juice and spread to 100 pages.
-
We are changing the site from .net to .com. Will that change the picture?
Oh.... be careful, you are changing the URL's. If doing that then you need 301 redirects.
We are creating an entire new navigation...
OK... and you will be changing the flow of power through your site and possibly the anchor text... I hope that you are using spiderable ways to link these pages.
If you don't understand the answers you are getting then I highly recommend getting an experienced person to check your work - especially if this is an important site that supports and business and its payroll.
-
We are creating an entire new navigation with many new urls and and entirely new funnel from entry through checkout.
We did a lot of on page optimization in the past few months and we are using those urls for our future site but there are many more that we will continue to optimize.
Our goal in doing this site renovation is for increased conversion rate and easier navigation.
We are changing the site from .net to .com. Will that change the picture?
-
Hi Michael,
It sounds to me that perhaps this might be more than just a redesign. Are you changing the platform the site is on? Let me know and I will answer in more detail.
Dana
-
Site design change right? If the designer is just going in and moving graphics around and such..it should not affect rankings at all.
EGOL is referring to wireframing and internal linking structure where a designer kills off a page and doesn't do redirects or ends up creating tons of 404s for ya.
-
If you are simply changing the "template" of the site the rankings should not fall. Unless you do sin such as changing the URLs or changing the on-page optimization or internal link structure.
If you are redesigning the site one of your goals should be making improvements in the rankings. If you are doing this in fear of loss then maybe you should have someone advising you with the project.
-
A site change won't cause any drop in rankings??
-
If your designer carefully preserves the on-page optimization and your internal link structure then your rankings should not go down.
If your designer does not understand how to preserve the on-page / link structure and knows that changing the URLs is a problem then you need a different designer.
-
Your rankings will not largely be affected by simply redesigning a site.
Things you have to consider:
-Content: Are you optimizing every page with relevant and search engine friendly content.
-Usability: Increasing user experience less bounce/exit.
-Site speed: Is your page loading quick enough, are there pages that hang?
Usually a good redesign doesn't result in a dramatic increase in your rankings..perhaps a small-med change.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
New site luanched- rankings plummeted
Hi all, we just launched a new version of our site and have seen huge drops in traffic to the homepage. Url structures were changed and now include /us at the end and a lot of the content was consolidated to make the homepage a little cleaner. We kept title tags and meta data the same. Rankings have declined significantly. Does anyone have any suggestions or advice?
Technical SEO | | perfectsearch711 -
Any problem with launching a redesigned site early without a few product categories?
Hello, My client wants to launch a redesign early, problem is they want to do this without a majority of their product pages, since the bulk of their sales aren't from these missing categories, will the resulting 404s hurt them? What is up, is the major pages structured around their primary keyword, most of their sales isn't from the product pages, but from the quotes turned into sales. Big ticket items aren't sold through the cart, they are call or email for quotes and normally those quotes are turned into sales once they realize the price is better. We will be adding these missing categories and products, just one section at a time. Since 404s don't hurt, and we don't rank very well from the products missing, should I be concerned about any thing else? Thank you
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
My beta site (beta.website.com) has been inadvertently indexed. Its cached pages are taking traffic away from our real website (website.com). Should I just "NO INDEX" the entire beta site and if so, what's the best way to do this? Please advise.
My beta site (beta.website.com) has been inadvertently indexed. Its cached pages are taking traffic away from our real website (website.com). Should I just "NO INDEX" the entire beta site and if so, what's the best way to do this? Are there any other precautions I should be taking? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | BVREID0 -
# in url affecting rank
Hi I am building links to a page www.companyname.com/category.index.php There is also another similar url www.companyname.com/category.index.php#. This page is linked to from the non # page. This is a new client and I'm not entirely sure why that link is there. Am I correct in thinking that these two urls are different in the eyes of the search engines? If so, would some of the link juice to www.companyname.com/category.index.php be transferred to www.companyname.com/category.index.php# and affect the ranking of the non # page? I hope this makes sense! Thanks
Technical SEO | | sicseo0 -
Sudden drop in ranking google.co.uk ranking
Anyone else had any sudden drops in rankings this week? Is there an update going on? One of my primary keywords has dropped from 6th to 49th in the google.co.uk search results. Not in webmaster tools to flag an issue. I have downloaded the links from webmaster and it does look if some content has been scraped and then linked back to us from a large number of sites that we have never sort links from. I have upload the google disavow link tool. Only one keyword appears to be effected not all of them? Any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | highwayfive0 -
Google ranking downgraded
On Sept 29th our website 'keyword' rankings who totally destroy. We were always #1 to #2 for these keywords 1. listing presentation
Technical SEO | | RandyRoussie
2. real estate presentation Our website is: http://www.agentpresentations.com We asked Google through Webmaster Tools to reconsider the site and they replied back saying nothing was wrong. We run Google Adwords and we contacted them and they looked at the keywords and sent screenshots to us showing the ranking we still there. But they are not... as proven in Webmaster tools. So Adwords told us to ask Webmaster Tools to reconsider the site again. Nothing yet... What do you suggest?0 -
Should I create mini-sites with keyword rich domain names pointing to my main site?
Hi, I'm new to seomoz (and seo in general) and loving it so far. My main domain name is more of a brandname than a search engine friendly list of keywords. I rank well for some keywords I optimized for, and less so for the more competitive keywords. I was wondering if making one page minisites hosted on keyword rich domain names could help in this respect? What I want to do is just have a single page with a few paragraphs of content and links to the main site. I am not looking for links to boost the main site, just for the minisites to do better for several keywords. Will this help? Is this ok, or against some Google policy? Can this hurt the main site rankings? Thank you! **Edit: **I noticed that sites ranking above me on the first page for some keywords have much less on-page elements than my page, have about the same domain trust and also very little inbound links. The only factor I can see is the exact match of keywords in the domain name.
Technical SEO | | Eladla1