SEO is far more effective and time-efficient when it’s considered from the beginning of a new site build or migration. It can be retrofitted, but that often involves a lot of time and effort changing elements that have already been built, as well as undoing changes. This can still leave the site with less-than-ideal set-ups that require further cost to change after the expense of a site build.
Potential problems when SEO isn’t considered pre-build:
- Loss of content that drives traffic
- URL changes that result in drops in position
- Unoptimised URLs
- Poor URL hierarchy
- Loss of internal links that provide search engines with a contextual map of the site
- Increase in 404s
- Complicated or missing redirects
Migrations often cause instability in search. Google and other search engines note that changes have happened, but they have to recrawl and reassess your whole site. In the meantime, you might see rankings drop. Including SEO from day one helps to minimise drops, get your rankings back up as quickly as possible and further improve your position too.
Key points
Site structure
Site structure has a big impact on SEO. It gives search engines context. For example, as there’s more than one place called Memphis, a page called ‘Memphis’ would rank for different terms if it’s located under a category of ‘Egypt’ versus ‘Tennessee’.
It also highlights importance. Your key landing or pillar pages are likely to be closer to the beginning of URLs, so if ‘Slovenia’ was a subsection of ‘Adventure Holidays’, the URL should be /adventure-holidays/Slovenia, but if you offer different types of holidays in Slovenia and that’s the more important landing page, it should be /Slovenia/adventure-holidays. Scoping out the site structure allows for better URLs, better interlinking and a contextual ‘map’ of the site that provides search engines with a better understanding of the individual content.
Site structure also aids navigation and user flow. Making it intuitive not only provides the search engines with context, but moves users along the marketing funnel too.
URLs
While it may be easy to change and redirect URLs if they aren’t quite right, search engines don’t like a lot of changes. Switching the folder that a whole section of content sits under, from /news/ to /blogs/ for example, can mean a whole series of content has big changes to its URLs.
While changing poor URLs to ones with good structure is a good thing, frequent changes aren’t. So it’s important to consider site structure from the beginning. If URLs are being changed, we really only want them to be changed once.
404s
When URLs are deleted and not redirected, they send a ‘404’ notification to search bots. Search engines don’t look favourably on sites with lots of 404s, so it’s best to decide whether there’s a relevant page to redirect them to, or we send a ‘410’ notification instead. This tells the search engines the page is gone, it’s meant to be gone and it’s not coming back.
Backlinks and internal linking
Your existing pages have lots of links from other sites, this tells search engines that other sites think yours is good and helps boost your rankings. If the pages being linked to disappear or aren’t properly redirected, the links break and you no longer get that boost.
Internal links – from pages in your site to other pages in your site - also provide search engines with context about your content. They help provide a map of related content and tells search engines which is the most important page for a keyword or topic. So, linking to the pain page for ‘Suffolk Holiday Homes’ from another, using the phrase ‘suffolk holiday homes’ tells search engines that this is the most important page for users looking for a holiday home in Suffolk. Losing that interlinking lessens the context.
What SEO can do to help
- Create a log of all the content on the site, tracking what pages are going or being created and how to handle each one
- Analyse intended site structure
- Advise on new URLs and redirects
- Ensure backlinks are retained
- Advise on ways to lessen page load time (image formats and sizes)
- Prevent pages from being orphaned (where there are no links from elsewhere on the site)
- Ensure robots.txt is correct, there’s an appropriate sitemap and submit it to Search Console for quicker indexing when the site goes live
Planning a new site or migration?
Don’t risk your rankings - speak to our SEO team about building with search in mind from day one.
