What Happens When You Don’t Build In SEO During A Website Transition? 

A previous client of ours had recently broken up with their other web design agency. Before re-engaging with us, they decided to move forward with another web design agency that did not employ SEO from the beginning. 

I’ve heard some people say that you can always add SEO back in after the redesign. I’m here to tell you that:

NO—That is not the way it should be done.

If you need further convincing, look at this image of their traffic before and after the redesign. You can clearly see when the transition happened.

When Should You Engage Your SEO Agency In A Website Transition Or Redesign?

The best answer is: As soon as you are thinking of making any change to your website.

Think of SEOs as a “lawyer” in a way. You don’t want to debut a new product or change a name without consulting a lawyer and then find out later that the name you chose is already in use and you are infringing on another company. The same goes for SEOs. You don’t want to find out later that you are actually pushing the search engines away or harming your online visibility.

Some of the items your SEO team will be looking for is your content and URL structure. If you are planning on removing some content from your updated website, your SEO agency will have a redirect strategy in place to ensure that none of your traffic will be hitting 404 pages.

In addition, they work closely with your creative web design team to ensure that while they may be pushing the boundaries of “what looks cool” in web design, they are also not harming the ability for search engines to effectively find and catalog your webpages.

By looping both teams in right away, you stand the best chance of having a successful redesign launch!