Full Transcript
[0:00]
Welcome to the 805 web minute. And today we're talking about how to upgrade your central coast business website without losing all the hard earned ranking and customer traffic you built up. It's probably the single biggest point of anxiety for local business owners. You know, your site is creaking. It's slow. Maybe it looks dated and it probably doesn't work right on a phone. Right. You know, you need that redesign. But the fear of just falling off of Google is terrifying. And that fear isn't just a rumor. It is based in a pretty tough reality for this deep dive. We pulled data from a few sources, including Google's own technical guides. And the picture they paint is, well, it's pretty sobering is. So our mission today is to cut through that anxiety. We want to isolate the few really predictable reasons that website redesigns fail and show you exactly what needs to happen to make sure it's a success. Let's not sugarcoat it though. Most businesses when they launch a new site, they're basically gambling, gambling with their revenue. Exactly. Our sources show that nearly nine out of 10 website changeovers, what we in the industry call a migration. They fail to improve search rankings. Nine out of 10. Think about that. Yeah. Most of the time, all that money and all that effort just leaves you right where you started or worse, worse is the key word there. When a redesign is handled poorly and by that, we mean it's rushed or just technically sloppy. It can cause a massive immediate traffic drop. We're talking huge drops up to 40% in your search traffic almost overnight. Imagine 40% of the phones that are ringing right now, just suddenly going silent for a business here in S. O'Lock County that kind of drop is catastrophic and the penalty lasts. It's not a quick fix. No, if you have a major failure during the launch, the average time to recover those lost rankings is nearly 18 months. 18 months, a year and a half, a year and a half of actively bleeding customers because of a technical mistake that honestly takes 10 minutes to fix if you do it right from the start.
[2:02]
That statistic 18 months, that should scare anyone into preparing properly. But what's fascinating here is that this isn't bad luck, right? Not at all. It's not some mysterious Google algorithm change. These are predictable, preventable mistakes that just get repeated over and over again. Exactly right. The issues we see are almost never about the design or the color of the buttons. They're four specific technical failures. Okay. And if you can avoid these four pitfalls, you sidestep 90% of the risk. All right. Let's unpack these. If you're a local business owner thinking about a new site, this is the blueprint for what you have to make sure your team prioritizes. So the first, and I mean, by far the most destructive mistake, it has to do with the addresses of your pages, your URLs. Okay. When you want your new site, those old page addresses almost always change. But the problem happens if you don't tell Google where the old page permanently moved to. So if I had a page that ranked really well for say best bike rentals, Pismo Beach at some old clunky address, and now my new site just calls that page Pismo bike rentals, I need to connect them. You don't just need to connect them. You need a permanent forwarding address. We call it a 301 redirect like mail forwarding when you move your business. Exactly like that. If you skip that 301 redirect, Google shows up at the old Pismo bike page, finds nothing and just marks it as missing dead. And when Google thinks a page is dead, what's the actual consequence there? A consequence is you lose everything. All that link equity or Google trust that page had built up for years, all gone instantly. The 301 is the only way to transfer that ranking credit over to the new page. Without it, your new page starts from zero. So missing even a few of those could be a big problem. Devastating, especially if it's one of your money pages, you know, the ones that actually bring in the leads, a successful migration means a one-to-one map for every important page. Anything less is just negligence. That sets us up perfectly for the second major failure.
[4:02]
The lazy redirect. This one drives me crazy. Yes, it's the quick and dirty solution that just guarantees your rankings will crash. So what is it? Instead of doing the hard work of mapping each old page to its specific new page, some people just send all the old traffic everything straight to the new home page. Okay. So if a customer was searching for my a royal Grande wine tasting schedule, they click the result. And they just land on my generic welcome to our winery page. Exactly. The visitor gets frustrated immediately, right? They hit the back button. But more importantly, Google sees that. It sees that total disconnect signal. Does that send to Google? It signals a failure of relevance. Google tried to answer a very specific question and you sent them to a generic page. So Google thinks, oh, I guess this business doesn't have that content anymore. And you're ranking for that specific thing. Just tanks. It crashes instantly. The lazy redirect just throws away all the specific ranking power. You've built up. That makes the stakes crystal clear. Okay. Mistake number three. This one sounds surprisingly easy to make and it's, it's completely fatal for getting to flip the switch. This is a classic, classic developer oversight. When a new site is being built, it's tagged with a setting that basically tells search engines, hey, don't list me in Google yet. The Noindex tag. That's the one. It's there. So your messy, unfinished site doesn't show up in public searches, which makes sense during development, of course. Right. But if that little Noindex tag is forgotten and it's still active when the new site goes live, Google will simply never show the website. Ever you've launched this beautiful fast site, but to Google, it's still a private constructions. So my site is live. I'm excited, but my search traffic just dropped to zero because I'm basically telling Google to ignore me and it usually takes a few weeks of no leads before the business owner realizes something is horribly wrong. By then, Google has already dropped the site from its index. You're starting from absolute zero here, human error completely.
[6:04]
That brings us to the fourth major flaw, losing important signals. This one's a bit more nuanced, but just as important. This is about the details Google uses to actually understand your content, the page titles, the little descriptions under the title and the search results, the text attached to your images, the things that tell Google what a page is actually about. Precisely in the rush of a rebuild, these crucial ranking, driving details often get ignored or just overwritten with generic stuff. So a carefully crafted title like best handyman service or roto Grande might get replaced with just services. And boom, all your local ranking power for that term just evaporates. It's a huge step backward. It's not usually a sudden crash, but more of a slow, steady erosion of your authority. So if we look at those four missing redirects, lazy redirects, the forgotten noynext tag and losing all that metadata, it's clear the danger is all technical. It's human error. That's the core insight. The system isn't punishing you for getting a better looking website. It's punishing technical failure. Now let's pivot to the good news because it absolutely does not have to be a disaster. What's the most reassuring fact for a nervous business owner in say San Luis Obispo? It's this. Google's own documentation says that if those permanent forwarding addresses, the three oh ones are set up correctly, you do not lose your ranking power. You get to keep it. You get to keep the credit you earned the trust transfers to the new pages. So your SEO investment is safe as long as the technical move is well flawless. Lawless is the right word, but Google does say to expect some fluctuation. They need time to recall every single page and process the changes. Full of temporary dip is not a disaster. It's just Google figuring things out. Exactly. You might see rankings bounce around for a few weeks. The difference between a normal 10 to 15% temporary dip and a permanent 40% crash is only the quality of the planning. And when things go right, the upside can be massive. We saw a case study where a proper redesign led to a 402% increase in overall traffic,
[8:07]
a 402% increase and an even bigger jump, 540% in traffic from search engines. That is a life changing number for a business. It really is. Yeah. And it's not an accident. It happens when you do the migration perfectly one and two. You make the new site much, much faster. Speed is a huge ranking factor now. Google rewards you for giving users a better, faster experience immensely. Okay. Let's give our listeners in the SLO area a clear timeline then. What should they expect when a redesign is managed properly? When it's done right, here's what you should see. For the first one to two weeks, expect that small temporary dip, maybe 10, 15%. That is normal. Do not panic. That's just Google processing the changes. Correct. Then by week three through eight things stabilize, rankings should firm up. And you'll see traffic start a clear upward trend. And then the payoff by months, two to three, you should be back to where you were. Or more likely doing significantly better because your new site is faster and works better for customers. The whole timeline depends on getting those technical details right from the very beginning. Your rankings aren't fragile, but they do depend entirely on that behind the scenes work. The redirects, the tags, the descriptions, get those right and an upgrade is an upgrade, not a gamble. Which brings us to how we handle this locally for our central coast businesses at Ugrow.pro. We treat SEO not as an afterthought, but as step one. It has to be step one. It's like pouring the foundation for a new house. Before any code gets written, we do that crucial redirect mapping. We identify every page that brings you customers and make sure it's forwarding addresses ready to go. And we build for speed right from the start. So when Google visits the new site, it's not just a passing grade. It's a positive signal that can actually boost your ranking. And that final launch process always include the check to prevent that forgotten switch error. We're focused on results for our neighbors here in a Royal Grande in AG. We get sites live in days, not months. No eight week agency timelines.
[10:07]
Yep. And you get local support. You can call and talk to a person right here in AG, not a ticket system. A redesign should be an upgrade, not a gamble. It should be a planned investment that secures your ranking while capturing all the upside. A fast well built site can deliver. That's a quick tip for today. If you want a professional website without the agency price tag or the DIY headache, here is the better way. At you grow.pro, we build it. We manage it and we handle every update forever all for just $79 a month. There is zero setup fee, no contract lock in and it is strictly month to month. So there is zero risk. We're local here in AG and we can have you live in days, not months. Want to see what your site could look like? Go to you grow.pro right now and we'll design three custom mock ups for your business. Completely free. No strings attached. Thanks for listening and keep growing.