I received the most horrifying email from a client the other day. They weren’t injured. Nor were they cancelling service and weren’t unhappy with anything. They built a new website!
Hey Ralph – Just a heads up our new site launched this morning. Let me know what you think!
That doesn’t sound so bad unless you understand how SEO and Web Design affect each other. You can easily put a new theme on your WordPress site and completely change the look (with some minor tweaks) but you’re also probably affecting all the parts of your site that make it rank well. A new theme out of the box is also likely not optimized for loading speed. Designers of these themes do a great job of making it look great, but they usually don’t put effort into anything other than the appearance (they’re only getting paid for what the website looks like).
Web Design vs. SEO
Everyone wants a good looking website and there’s no reason you can’t. What you have to keep in mind is how much the back end and code that makes the site look good affects your rankings. There’s a ton that goes into the behind the scenes part of a website to promote it on Google:
- URL Structure
- Canonical Tags
- robots.txt directives
- Pages that were intentionally no-indexed
- Overall site performance which is a huge ranking factor.
- …And about two dozen other factors
What To Do After a Site Launch
Step one – go back in time and tell your SEO consultant you’re launching a new site even before that process starts. There is so much that goes into the design of a site that affects rankings. It’s critical for your website marketing team to be intertwined in the design and development process.
Assuming you can’t join Doc and Marty on their next adventure and you have to deal with the potential fallout here’s the next best thing. It’s time to circle the wagons and run our full set of website SEO audits to see what changed in the new site.
Typically there are a lot changes to critical SEO components when a new theme is applied. If you’re lucky one thing that’s still the same is your url structure. If not, you’re in a world of IMMEDIATE hurt because Google can’t find your pages anymore! If your old site had a url of …com/about-us/ and now it’s ..com/about/ Google doesn’t know there’s a new place for that page and content so they assume your page(s) are simply gone and remove them from their rankings all together.
In the case above it took nearly a an entire month’s budget to fix all the SEO issues from the new theme. If we were along for the ride the whole time it would have been a fraction of the effort.
The Bottom Line
If you launch a site without considering the SEO aspects you’ll likely lose rankings. It’s very important to design the site with visual as well as rankings in mind. If you’re not sure what that means give us a call and let us review your new theme before it launches and we’ll let you know if there are any issues.