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
-
Rankings Dropped to Nothing
We're kind of in crisis mode, as our ad revenue is about to take a huge hit. Hoping someone can help me figure out what to do next. Site: https://indoorgardening.com Here's what I did (below) that I think broke things somehow. I'm clearly not an SEO expert but thought I was making things better. And things did improve over the last week or so but then fell apart 2 days ago. 1. Most posts did not have a Yoast focus keyword. I added keyword phrases and used Yoast suggestions to optimize for that and for readability. 2. In some cases I changed post titles to better reflect the keyword phrase. 3. In some cases I changed the slug per Yoast's suggestion and did a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one. 4. I used Grammarly to fix all spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. 5. Some Yoast-suggested changes that were made: Image alt tags, subheading structures, adding keyword to subheadings, first paragraph, and meta description, changed sentence length for those over 20 words to clean up the text, added transition words where applicable, reworded passive voice sentences, added internal links when needed, eliminated consecutive sentences (first word), improved Flesch reading ease when necessary. 6. I also added or changed Amazon affiliate links where needed and swapped out images when necessary. Results:
Technical SEO | | Jbyron
I started this project about 3 weeks ago. On 11/29 we had one of our highest traffic days, with 1017 hits coming from Google. On 11/30, 257 hits came from Google, and on 12/1, 3 (three!!) hits came from Google. At this point, 82 of 89 posts have a double green "Good" score in Yoast; 6 are "OK" and 1 does not have a focus keyword designated. Thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide. -John0 -
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 -
Fluctuation in Ranking for the keywords
We were ranking well for most of the keywords.These keywords were at first page i.e mostly @ 1st and 2nd position in Google.But we have put the following tag ie no index tag for our pages by mistake and after that the ranking fluctuated & fell down in Google search results as our pages were out of index in Google .We have removed the noindex tag after encountering the problem.Now I can see my pages are cached & indexed in Google after submitting to index in Google webmaster tool.Can I regain my ranking for the keywords and within how many days I would regain my previous ranking?
Technical SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Site disappeared from rankings at 5th of October
Hello, I have a travel guide site at www.taylandgezirehberi.com It is the most detailed site about Thailand in Turkish language. It has 300 hundred pages of unique content that I wrote from scratch. Site was doing great at Google Turkey. I was at 2nd place for keyword "Tayland". Also I was in first 5 at almost every Tayland related keyword. I survived Penguin really good, but at 5th of October Penguin data refresh my site got totally trashed. Now site doesn't appear at any keyword at all. I suspect this maybe because of some link wheels that I bought about 8-9 months ago when I was inexperienced. Also I had 4-5 backlinks from my sites at other unique IP adresses. I admit doing mistakes, but I think the punishment was really harsh for a unique content site. I sent a reconsideration request, but got the answer "No manual spam actions found." I contacted the guy who did link wheel, had him removed some of the links. Also I used Disallow Tool and submitted some other spammy url's. This deranking effected me really bad, do you have some other suggestions that might help? Thanks a lot
Technical SEO | | gezginrocker0 -
What is wrong with my site?
I have been working hard for over two months on my sites in seomoz and have seen some nice results in some (www.etraxc.com/ and www-my-etraxc.com for instance. Still I am really frustrated by www.classroomconnection.us/. I cant even get on the first page with the search term "classroom connection." i would love some help on this one. On a related note, does it help to have links to YouTube videos about the content? If so, how do I ensure that this piece is working well for me? Thanks a ton!
Technical SEO | | bobbabuoy0 -
Ranking in more than one country
Hi, I have a website http://goo.gl/IrJz4 and currently it was ranking well in Google US serps. And now i want to rank well it india too. Does doing more links will bring the results or do i need to do any on page seo ? Please advice me.
Technical SEO | | Dexx220 -
Rankings Dropped Dramatically
Hi All, I need some advice on this one, one of our websites is performing very badly and I am lost to know why. We migrated from an old website www.myclient.co.uk and re-directed to www.myclient.com. The issue we had was that the old site relied on search results i.e. www.myclient.co.uk/search+villas+in+marbella However most ranked url's were not as tidy as the example above and had lots of characters. Because of this and the fact that all incoming links were to the homepage we do not carry out any 301 re-directs. In some keywords we have increased our rankings but for others we have dropped dramatically. keyword 1 4th Jan position 22 9th Jan position 90 keyword 2 4th jan position 34 9th jan position 89 keyword 3 4th jan position 12 9th jan position 16 (a smaller drop than the others) We do have some top 10s for this domain so I don't think we have been penalised for anything but I am shocked to see such drops in rankings. I have setup the website so that each page targets different keywords and I have checked and they get A grades within SEOmoz. Any advice would be really appreciated, as the client is not too happy at the moment. Many thanks Andy
Technical SEO | | iprosoftware0 -
How hard is it to rank above a site that has 300 back links from dex?
I am new to SEO and have started my keyword research. One keyword I would like to rank for has a competing site with over 400 back links, 300 of which are from dex. How hard would it be to outrank links coming from dex?
Technical SEO | | marker-3115280