Modifications in content material, linking, and URL construction can dramatically affect natural search efficiency. Thus it’s important to grasp the search engine dangers and rewards from a brand new design earlier than you begin creating it.

That is the tenth installment in my “search engine optimisation How-to” sequence. Earlier installments are:

  • “Half 1: Why Use It?“;
  • “Half 2: Understanding Search Engines“;
  • “Half 3: Staffing and Planning for search engine optimisation“;
  • “Half 4: Key phrase Analysis Ideas,”
  • “Half 5: Analyzing Key phrase Information,”
  • “Half 6: Optimizing On-page Components“;
  • “Half 7: Mapping Key phrases to Content material“;
  • “Half 8: Structure and Inside Linking.”
  • “Half 9: Diagnosing Crawler Points.”

Search engines like google crawl websites to find out the relevance and authority of every web page: what the content material is about and the way it’s linked. Modifications to content material, hyperlinks, construction, URLs, and extra affect how search engines like google crawl a web page after which assign the relevance and authority to find out its natural rating.

Thus redesigns and replatforms carry an natural search threat — and a chance.

Assessing Threat

First, determine what’s altering. For instance, a website redesign might imply a wholesale migration to a brand new platform with an accompanying change in taxonomy, navigation, and content material. Or it may very well be a change in colours and pictures. The latter could haven’t any affect on search engine optimisation. The previous, nevertheless, would prone to have a large affect.

Attempt to isolate what shall be added, eliminated, or modified on particular pages and inner hyperlinks.

Subsequent, decide the precise and potential worth of every web page and hyperlink.

A web page’s potential worth comes from its key phrase theme — which key phrases ought to it rank for, and what number of searches monthly do they signify? The upper the variety of searches, the extra potential worth.

The potential worth represents a chance to enhance natural search efficiency. Ignoring the potential worth restricts future success.

The precise worth of a web page is predicated on internet analytics — the variety of visits and the quantity of income from natural search. The precise worth tells you what to guard and which pages to give attention to.

Hyperlink worth has potential and precise elements, too. Every inner hyperlink amplifies the web page it hyperlinks to, giving search engines like google an thought of a website’s priorities — the extra hyperlinks to a web page, the louder the authority alerts. Eradicating hyperlinks to a web page might lead to much less authority and decrease natural rankings.

There’s no course of to exactly measure the search engine optimisation affect of inner hyperlinks to a web page. Basically, once more, extra is best, and fewer is worse.

Threat vs. Reward

Figuring out the organic-search worth of your pages, think about eradicating a whole part or product line. Not all content material and merchandise have the identical worth. A big content material space might have little search engine optimisation affect, and vice versa.

If the loss can be massive, what might you do to mitigate that threat? A full-site redesign or replatform, whereas useful for buyers, usually has a big affect on natural search.

For instance, say a once-prosperous ecommerce website has change into stale and tough to make use of. A brand new taxonomy might assist buyers discover merchandise faster. However it requires altering URL buildings sitewide and revamping the header navigation. Branding modifications might freshen the positioning’s attraction, however it will imply new content material and fashionable, minimalist design, which might scale back textual content and, thus, relevance. And a brand new customized consumer expertise might depend on cookies.

In brief, the redesign would affect the natural search efficiency of each web page on the positioning.  The danger is 100%.

However there are lots of good causes for reimagining the positioning. The advantages might outweigh the search engine optimisation threat. Subsequent week, I’ll deal with methods to flip that threat into natural search enchancment.

See “Half 11: Mitigating Threat.”