Site Redesign - Regaining Rankings

[EcomLkwd]

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?

[danatanseo]

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

[Vizergy]

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...

[danatanseo]

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

[Vizergy]

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...

[EcomLkwd]

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

[William.Lau]

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.

[EGOL]

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.

[EcomLkwd]

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?

[danatanseo]

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

[William.Lau]

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.

[EGOL]

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.

[EcomLkwd]

A site change won't cause any drop in rankings??

[EGOL]

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.

[William.Lau]

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.