Full Transcript
Lauren: Okay, so my friend has had the same website for like five years. It's kind of embarrassing at this point... but she's terrified to get a new one because she's afraid she's gonna lose all her Google rankings. Is that a real thing?
Honor: Welcome to the 805 Web Minute with Lauren and Honor... We make interwebs and website stuff make sense... Let's get into it.
Honor: So... her fear is actually completely valid. The data on this is pretty scary.
Lauren: Oh no. How scary are we talking?
Honor: Nearly 9 out of 10 website redesigns fail to improve SEO. And a badly done redesign can drop your traffic by 40 percent.
Lauren: Wait... 9 out of 10? That's like... almost everyone!
Honor: Yeah. And here's the part that really hurts... the average time to recover lost rankings? About 18 months.
Lauren: 18 months! That's a year and a half of your business just... not showing up on Google?
Honor: Potentially, yeah. But here's the thing... these aren't random disasters. They're the same four mistakes happening over and over again.
Lauren: Okay, what are the mistakes? Because now I need to know.
Honor: Number one, and this is the biggest... missing redirects. When you get a new website, the page addresses often change. Like, maybe your services page used to be slash services, now it's slash what-we-do. If you don't set up what's called a redirect... basically a forwarding address... Google treats that as a completely new page.
Lauren: Oh! So all the Google trust you built up on the old page just... disappears?
Honor: Gone. Start from zero. And mistake number two is even lazier... some people just redirect everything to the homepage.
Lauren: That's like... if the post office couldn't figure out your new address, so they just sent all your mail to city hall. And you're like, cool, I guess I live at city hall now?
Honor: Ha! Exactly. Google hates it. Visitors hate it. Your rankings tank.
Lauren: What's number three?
Honor: Forgetting to flip the switch. When websites are being built, they usually have a tag that says, \