Do this to ensure effective SEO for website rebuilds

In this episode I'm talking about how to handle SEO for second and repeat website builds.

Hi, I'm Holly Christie and welcome to Websites Made simple, the podcast for website designers and developers to learn how to run their business their way and love doing so. I am a website designer. I am now, as of last week, a triple award winning web designer as well.

But I also mentor website designers like you so that you can have a career you absolutely love.

And whilst this podcast is mainly focused on the running of your business, every now and then we're going to look at something that is really, really important that you may not be quite there with yet. Because website design is mainly a self taught profession.

So it means that we're always learning and some of us are just further along that path from me say, what I really want is for you to learn from all of my mistakes. Because trust me, if I can help you avoid these mistakes, I really, really will.

We all know the importance of SEO in website design, that we can build the best looking websites in the world.

But if they are not getting found, then our clients aren't going to be happy, they're not going to be recommending us, we won't be able to do great performance reports. You know, a lot relies not just on the skill of the design, but the effectiveness of the websites as well.

And trust me, as someone who has had websites pull in leads and make sales within 25 hours of launching on one website, having 2, 3 leads coming in within 10 days on brand new website domains, I really have got you here as well. The reason that SEO can vary and can feel more difficult for second and subsequent website builds is because the website is already there.

You know, there's already something that search engines have been looking at.

They may have decided that it was good and been showing it in people's results, or they might have decided it wasn't good and not showing it in results.

But whatever has happened, those URLs attached to the website are live and they're out there in the world and if they suddenly just get whipped away, then search engines do not like it.

And as much as search engines will look at websites page by page, rather than indexing an entire website, remember that there are still tools out there which are looking at things like SERP schools and stuff like that. If you haven't heard of SERP ratings, it's like basically how much authority your website has on the Internet.

I wouldn't put too much truck by these because small business websites, which is what I specialize in, they're never going to have hugely high SERP ratings because high SERP rating websites are things like LinkedIn and Facebook and, you know, ones which have huge power banks behind them.

But considering a SERP rating is a tool that is still used for measuring website success, we have to do everything that we can on those lower ends of the scale. You know, essentially building this website SEO brick by brick by brick to give a lot of credibility to the website.

And as I said a bit earlier, the more credibility that your websites have, the more credibility that you as a designer or developer will have as well. So it's a really important thing here as well.

So the very first thing I want to to really impress upon you is when you are building a new website or doing a rebuild for someone, do not trash the old website. When I first started out and in the early days of web design, I didn't really know about SEO.

It was something that came along much later and I learned about SEO from the mistakes that I made.

And one of the mistakes that I used to make is I would just trash the old website and I wouldn't think anything of the URLs that were out there or how search engines would respond to it or anything like that. I would just be like, here's your shiny new website. Good luck.

And whilst I'm very lucky that I had lovely customers, and as you'll know if you follow this podcast, I have really good communication practices. I've got great contracts, I've got processes that really make my clients feel very held.

And so it means that mistakes like those were kind of forgiven. And over time I learned how to rectify them as well. I was really lucky to work with some great SEO people who pointed me in the right direction.

And lucky for you, I've now spent the last 10 years specializing in websites that have really good SEO history behind them as well.

If you aren't so sure on SEO, I do have a course called Unlocking SEO SEO boost your website's online visibility and that is available on my website for you lovely designers and developers and it's courses.thisdemandinglife.com and you'll find everything you need to know on there around website SEO and what you need to do to really hit those marks and release websites which are scoring 100 on the SEO website structure and build every time. When we do submit those results to Google, you know, when we look at our page speed insights and stuff like that.

And if you're not looking at page speed insights when you are publishing or Due to publish a website, do make it part of your practice because one, you need to learn what you could do better to the website. It might be that you need to make images a little bit smaller or your accessibility is not quite hitting it, or something like that.

It's always great to be able to show a client, here's your scores as we go live as well.

And I've had it before where I've had clients can go a little bit off the rails at times, particularly if they are looking at their website to be a magic wand to a failing business or a business that's not doing very well. And they can come back and say, well, you didn't build the website properly. And so actually these were your schools the days that we went live.

And I also include a website user manual with every website build as well. And I put the PageSpeed scores in there as well. I screenshot the Google one, have the link to it. This is what it is when going live.

And it's that real way. You'll see that one of my previous episodes was how to deal with tricky website clients. It's a real way of handling that as well.

So if you're not doing that to build that instance part of your practice.

So the first thing that we know is that we're not going to trash the old website, which means the best practice that we can do is actually build the new website on a temporary domain. And one of the reasons that I always advise this is so that we don't hand over websites until they are paid for.

Because people can be funny about payments or take their time.

You can have stuff hanging around, but if you get the website to the point where it's built and it's ready to go and the client can see it on the temp domain and all that sort of thing, then they just need to pay for it. And then we can change the primary domain and get it all up and running for them.

If you don't know how to do that, it might be that you could use a little bit of mentoring to fill in the gaps. And you're very welcome to get in touch with me as I offer mentoring as a service. That's the very first thing.

The second thing that we want to do, the second thing that we want to do is we want to look at using a tool that's going to scrape all of the URLs that have been associated with that website.

And the reason that we want to do this is website owners will sometimes create, say, a blog and then think, oh, it hasn't performed well, or I've moved on from that or something like that. And then they've gone and they've taken down that block, they've deleted it or they've drafted it.

And the same happens with landing pages is that often people will create a landing page thinking, I'm going to do this event or I want to sell this ticket or do something along those lines. And they create a page for the event and then once the event or ticket's sold, whatever it is has been and gone, they trash the page.

They don't think anymore about the URL.

But that URL usually will have been indexed by Google, particularly if they're working with maybe a SEO specialist or an ads manager or something like that who have directly submitted the URL to the Google search console. So it's really important that those links don't just disappear and that we redirect them to somewhere else.

So we look at redirecting maybe to the homepage, maybe to. If it's a blog that you've taken down, we might redirect to a different blog or send it to another resource.

The last thing that we want to do is send it to a 404 page, because the more 404 errors that you get on your website, the less likely your website is going to start coming up in search engines. Because Google and other search engines, they don't want to send people to kind of broken links or to places that aren't where they say they are.

Remembering that Google relies on advertising and paid sponsorship and that sort of thing for their stream of income. And they're not going to be able to charge as highly if the websites aren't, you know, if they're sending people to underperforming websites.

So what you really, really need to do is keep on top of your URL structure here. And whilst you're doing this as well, you'll often be importing blogs from, from other people's websites if it's a rebuild.

And it's really important that if those clients have put links in those blogs, that you test those links and you make sure they still work and that they're not going to 404 pages. Because we all know that a really important part of SEO is that people are using kind of backlinks to other websites.

So it's very easy to lose track of where a client's been linking to and whether all of these work. And as part of a rebuild, it's really important that you test all of those things.

So we did talk about as well having a tool that will scrape all of those URLs. I personally use Screaming Frog and there's actually a free version of it.

And if you're not dealing with massive websites or anything like that, then you should be absolutely fine just to download.

I work off Mac and it's an app for Mac, or you can probably run it off the website as well, but it's screamingfrog.com you type in the URL and it will give you a list of all of the URLs associated with that site, including all of the ones which are broken links or not leading anywhere. And then you can easily just set up a redirection. If you're working in WordPress like I do, you can use a plugin, I use 301 redirect.

Redirect it automatically redirects it if you've got your site structure in place. But you can also manually redirect URLs there as well.

And it is time well spent because it means that there shouldn't be a drop in SEO when you do launch the new website as well. Another thing to consider is also using the same URLs as the original website.

So when you've got things like home, about services, getting touch, contact, you know, that sort of thing, it can be tempting to think, oh well, it's services on the other website. So we're going to change our one to like services for your business or something like that. And yeah, it's easier for SEO.

Just keep the same URL and update the page.

And of course, if you've handled the website on a temporary domain, you can easily do this with, without interrupting anything, without any websites being put into safe mode or anything like that as well. Remember to do that one word I want to say as well about importing blogs. And this is really to WordPress users.

If you are rebuilding a website and the original site has been built in Elementor, do not import the blogs from there. Elementor. I know lots of people use it. I have a whole host of reasons that I do not recommend it.

I won't go into them all now, but one of the things that I have noticed over the past year is that elemental, when you rebuild and you've imported something from the original site, it often fragments in the database and it can cause all ends of issues where it fragments in the database, it goes right down to the WordPress level as well. So if you have done this, if you've imported blogs from Elementor, but you're now using different bits of software and the site's a bit buggy.

Maybe like not all the updates like. I particularly noticed that it doesn't run translation updates, or like it's flipping between an old homepage and a new one or something like that.

The first port of call for this is actually to do a new WordPress install so you can shift all that old install off, do a new install, load the new site on it and then run it back through as a primary domain as well. So that's it for today, a relatively quick one.

I'm just going to recap what we've learned today, which is do not trash a website and make sure that you have done all of your URL redirects that you have used the same URLs where appropriate for things like the about page, page services, pages, contacts, that sort of thing. If you don't have a process when you rebuild a website, feel free to follow mine from this episode and do let me know how you get on.

You can reach me at websitesmadesimple.co.uk There's a form on there. You can just pop in there and say, oh, I've listened to this episode. This were my thoughts, or this is what I've had, or this is what I've done.

I would love to hear from you. That's all for this week. I'll see you again soon.

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