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
-
Mobile site is not ranking in the mobile search results
I posted last month about problems with a mobile site, which is served from a separate URL (m.mydomain.com) as currently responsive design is not an option. The problem was that the mobile site was being returned in the desktop index along with the desktop site, and the desktop site was being returned in the mobile index instead of the mobile site. I have therefore implemented rel=canonical and rel=alternate as is advised by Google, but this has stopped the desktop site from appearing in the mobile index, but hasn't caused the mobile site to rank instead. What should I do now? One idea I have is to remove the rel=canonical and rel=alternate links so that the desktop site ranks in the mobile index again. There is a redirect in place anyway so when people click on a desktop link from a mobile search, they will still be redirected to the mobile equivalent. I could then set the m.mydomain.com to noindex to stop it from being returned in the desktop results and potentially causing duplicate content issues? What do you think about this as a work around?
Technical SEO | | pugh0 -
What is the best way to find missing alt tags on my site (site wide - not page by page)?
I am looking to find all the missing alt tags on my site at once. I have a FF extension that use to do it page by page, but my site is huge and that will take forever. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | franchisesolutions1 -
Redesigning the site with same Domain (IMP.)
technical SEO question - If we take down a site and use the same domain but just redesign the whole site. I guess sometimes in this case Google still keeps indexing old pages though they do not exist now! What the solution for this? Google suggests redirect them to a 404 page but in this case as its same domain- Is it possible that we throw 404 errors and redirect them to 404 page and this 404 page exists in the new site itself (but of course we don't have link our menu to this 404 page) (if that makes sense)? Would appreciate if you can suggest or add anything to above topic.
Technical SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
On-site adjustment opinions
Hi folks, I've got a fairly interesting scenario. I'm trying to rank this page (http://www.staysa.co.za/sa/1-2-0-0-1/East-London/accommodation) better for the term, "accommodation east london". The client isn't keen on making many changes and it was built horribly with ASP, half CMS, half not. I have made the following changes today: I introduced two paragraphs of text below the H1 tag. I changed "East London Bed and Breakfast", "East London Conference Venues", "East London Cottage / Chalet" to just "Bed and Breakfast", "Conference Venues", "Cottage / Chalet" as the continual key phrase duplication in my experience is a bad move. I've made a change to the title tag (this is a huge mission as it's not CMS controlled, so I had to teach myself some basic ASP to do so). Meta data.. nightmare to change unfortunately, at least not without rewriting part of the CMS. I'm wondering, are there any other on-site factors that I'm missing? I'm not a fan of site-wide links, so I don't want to put an exact match anchor text link from the sidebar/footer to the page, not unless someone can motivate why I should. Keen to hear everyone's opinions 🙂
Technical SEO | | ChristopherM0 -
How much damage in search rank will my site suffer during an upcoming cms migration?
Hello, This is my first time on the seomoz forums and I hope I can get a real answer from this community of experts. I am migrating an existing site from an older cms (modx) to a newer cms (expression engine). The domain name isn't changing and neither will the keywords and keyphrases for existing pages. What is changing, however is the url suffix. This means I am going from www.domain.com/page-name.html to www.domain.com/page-name I can't seem to replicate the html sufffix in the new urls. Now this is the only reason why I will be setting up 301 permanent redirects from the old urls to the new ones. My question is: Will the domain suffer a loss in page rank or a substantial decline in search engine position as a result of this migration process? How fatal will it be? When can I expect my rankings to recover?
Technical SEO | | amit20760 -
Not ranking well in Google
Hi, I am new to Seomoz,I have some little doubts regarding <title>tag.</p> <p>Can i target 3 words in the title tag. Currently i am on top for one keyword, and i cant get the rest two in top positions. Here is my website, can anyone review my site please.</p> <p>xxx(dot)ridpiles(dot)com with keyword hemorrhoids treatment</p> <p>I have good amount of backlinks, but still something i am missing. I have 100% unique content.</p> <p> </p> <p>Regards</p></title>
Technical SEO | | Dexter22387874870 -
Why does my site have a PageRank of 0?
My site (www.onemedical.com) has a PageRank of 0, and I can't figure out why. We did a major site update about a year ago, and moved the site from .md to .com about 9 months ago. We are crawled by Google and rank on the first page for many of our top keywords. We have a MozRank of 4.59. I figured this is something that would just take time to work out of the system, but nothing seems to change while we patiently wait. One more thing to note - when a user comes to the homepage (city selector) and selects their region they will then be cookied and directed to their relevant city site on subsequent visits. But even our city-specific pages (ie www.onemedical.com/sf) have pageranks of 0. My management team keeps asking me about this and I suspect there is something silly that we keep overlooking...but for the life of me, can't figure it out. Any help would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | OneMedical0
