It’s taken months, but finally the agency or in house team have made the new website. It’s everything you asked for and you are excited to launch. But wait… read this article BEFORE you dare press “go live”. This might just save your job if PPC and SEO results are vital to you.
URL’s
New websites are great, a breath of fresh air in the business. Usually with new websites comes about a URL structure change. A new system may treat products or service differently. Blog posts are dealt with differently by different base technologies.
Have you thought about how this will affect your PPC? Campaigns, usually standard or shopping, won’t perform if you change the URL’s, for example:
yourwebsite.co.uk / category / sub category / product
maps differently on the new site:
yourwebsite.co.uk / new category name / sub category / altered product name
Which when hosted by your PPC ads will show errors, your traffic will go and either your wasting money on a 404 OR Google / other platforms are available will just switch your ad off.
Mo link, mo click , mo money, mo job. *pulls sad face*
It does happen people, just recently, not even on a new website, a developer altered a page to add new services and the changed the page name, which in turn changed the URL. The developer told nobody and thankfully I was a day away from reviewing the PPC account. Phew, crisis averted, but you got to watch those developers…
Rankings
Let’s turn our attention to SEO. I mean this Google Search Console graph probably says all it needs to say:
But let’s look at why this happens, I think this should help:
This is an eCommerce website that trades across the world and so has the same content in many languages. The website was rebuilt using a different platform but none of the URL’s matched the old sote and nor were they mapped through from the old site to the new site. Here’s how to deal with it…
yourwebsite.co.uk / category / sub category / product
Needs to 301 to
yourwebsite.co.uk / new category name / sub category / altered product name
Honestly, check this stuff
Please PLEASE make sure you map through your old website to your new. Your new website will be all singing and all dancing, but if you don’t let search engines know that your old URLs have moved you will tumble. IT may be short term granted. However, in our experience, it’s long term and damaging. We’ve seen this twice in the space of a month and anonymised the clients, but the stats are real.
If you need help, you know what to do – click here.
