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
-
Ranking fluctuation
According to Miles Rank tracking I have a keyword that is fluctuating by 5 or 6 positions in a 24-hour period every time it goes 10 down to 15 and back to 10 again with very little stopping point in between and keeps fluctuating like that. As far as I know the website is stable it uses Magento 1.9 and is a fixed category page. The page URL is relatively new as we migrated from an old site with a different URL structure I added 301s at server level from the old page URL to the new one. There is only two things I can think that can be the problem -
Technical SEO | | seoman10
1. Lack of links directly to the page (there is literally only one or two)
2. Loading speed problem But I don't see any of these would cause a 5 position fluctuation regularly every day. But do you have any thoughts? Thanks in advance.0 -
Does my "spam" site affect my other sites on the same IP?
I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it. While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me. Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues? Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
Site redesign. Possible SEO problems?
Hi! Our website has enjoyed good rankings for lots of our keywords for the past 9years. Over the years the site became heavy, so we want to change the design radically. Content, filenames, titles, urls etc. will all remain identical just the change of a template. The new one is minimalistic and responsive design. We are worrying this may drop our domain or page authority and kill all our past SEO efforts. **How to do this with the least harm to our rankings? Anything we need to avoid?**Articles/advice/suggestions comments on design and SEO would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your help! Alina
Technical SEO | | skalfa0 -
Site:www.tld.com rank is it a measure of googles per page importance?
Hello, does the order of pages in a site:www.tld.com search show how important each page is to google? what if the homepage is not the first result?
Technical SEO | | adamzski0 -
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 -
Moving Site with #1 Ranking to New Domain
I want to move a site of mine that ranks #1 for many keywords to a new domain name. I have already redirected many smaller less important sites to the new domain, but have held off on my most popular site. If I redirect the entire site with a 301 redirect, what can I expect with my number one ranking, particular for coveted search terms..thanks for the input.
Technical SEO | | insync0 -
Problem with my site
the site is casino.pt we created the site 7-8 month ago, we started to push it by good and natural links (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.casino.pt/a!links!!filter!all!!source!external!!target!page), links in sites with content rich and most of them related to gambling and sport topics. During the first 3-5 months, the rankings were better and better, after the 6 months, the site lose all its rankings. Aditional details http://www.casino.pt/robots.txt http://www.google.pt/#hl=pt-PT&source=hp&biw=1280&bih=805&q=site:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.casino.pt&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&fp=2651649a33cd228 no critical errors in google webmaster tools any idea how can I fix it? thanks
Technical SEO | | Yaron530