Often times, business owners or managers are apprehensive about altering or updating their website, and especially cautious about moving to a new design altogether. At Reach Beyond Marketing, we want to reassure our clients that, if done correctly, there is no reason to fear moving to a new and improved website design.
As an overview, Search Engine Optimization is the value and recognition of your online presence by search engine giants like Google. In order to find your website online, Google ranks the quality and reputation of your site in search engine results pages (SERPs) to best appease user searches. To show up high on SERPs, you need to employ both on and off-page SEO tactics. Off-page SEO tactics include being active on social media platforms, having a user-friendly interface, posting relevant content, and updating online listing presences. On-page SEO calls for a more tactical design strategy, building your website with title tags, header tags, and alt tags for images to ensure that your website is easily discovered by search engine giants.
The concerns for many business owners arise when it comes to altering the design of your website. Will changes in interface or appearance cause the SEO to drop or disappear? The experts at Reach Beyond Marketing say no. Even if your business alters the appearance, layout, or content on the website, the SEO of your business will be unaffected by the changes. In fact, search engines like Google value updates and maintenance to consistently improve the user experience.
Where it can get tricky, however, is if your business is changing domain names. An alteration in domain will require Google to crawl the pages again so that it understands where to find your website. However, if done correctly, switching domain names or moving to a new address doesn’t mean your hard work on SEO goes to waste. Design experts can prepare for a move to ensure that Google is ready to find your new and improved site almost immediately. By utilizing Webmaster Tools, design teams can give Google a heads up about a website change so that your existing SEO presence can be transferred to the new site quickly. Additionally, inserting 301 redirects automatically lead clients from the old sites to the new location, ensuring that the SEO shift is set up properly and keeping your site’s value intact.