Aloha, Nick Ponte here. I own a web design and SEO agency in Maui, Hawaii. Every week, I bring tips to help business owners learn how to get the most from their digital marketing strategies. Recently, I shared the advantages a Maui social media manager can provide to Hawaii businesses.
I’ve talked to many business owners who hired someone to redesign their website, and unfortunately all their SEO progress disappeared. The businesses lost any history they had with search engines, which means their digital footprint shrunk to almost nothing. What a disaster.
To avoid this outcome, you need to know what to look for in a web design company. The company you work with should have the ability to preserve the SEO you’ve already built when they redesign your website.
How can you protect your SEO gains when you hire a Maui web design company?
Also Read: What Can a Maui SEO Company Do for You?
Avoid the Loss of Your Progress
With a website redesign, your goal is improvement—not starting from scratch. Even while you want to see increased traffic and a broader reach, you probably already have a digital footprint and a history of SEO through your current website. Those things have supported your brand’s reputation and your ability to convert online, and you don’t want to lose that.
When you hire a web designer to help you relaunch a website, make sure they prioritize and support your SEO progress. Without this focus, you could end up starting your SEO journey from scratch. Since SEO takes time to ripen effective results, you absolutely need to avoid losing that progress.
I want to share several points to discuss with a Maui web designer you consider working with for a website relaunch. You can avoid the disaster of losing your SEO progress when you know the right topics to address with designers.
How to Know whether a Maui Web Designer will Protect Your SEO
Bring up these talking points with your potential website designer:
1. Talk to Them about Goals
You want to ensure your web redesign maintains the value your current site has. Your site already has a history of rankings and link value, and they should know how to keep and improve it. If that history gets lost, you would have to spend a significant amount of time rebuilding it. The updated site should instead build on what you already have.
Avoid these losses by discussing your specific goals with prospective web designers. What do you want to achieve with your website and its redesign? You probably aim to drive traffic, increase organic search results, and improve your conversions. How will your updated website support your digital marketing campaigns? How can you improve user experience?
When you have clear goals, it helps both parties understand the needs of your business. You also have a higher chance of seeing the results you want from the redesign. A professional Maui web designer knows how to help get you to a place of success. With a quality Maui web designer, you’ll also receive reports that allow you to track improvements. Then you can better understand how your investment pays off with progress.
2. Get on the Same Page about Strategy
Does the web designer understand that design doesn’t trump content? What do they plan to do with all of your current content? Does your content currently convey your message to customers? Or do you want help reframing it, so customers understand the most accurate representation of your company?
While you want the web designer to have a strategic eye for site organization and user-friendliness, you don’t want them to erase any current valuable pages if they are still important to your strategy. Make sure you can stay on the same page about the theme and message you want presented by your website. Also, ensure the web designer understands how changes to the site’s architecture, content, and redesign will impact SEO. Determine your non-negotiables for your website redesign plan.
3. Discuss How They Handle Redirected Links
You know how irritating it is to come across outdated links for a webpage you want to visit. No one likes to have that 404 message pop up on their screen; You certainly don’t want your customers experiencing that when they click a link to your site. A Maui web designer ought to work with you to create a plan for this. Your old links should have automatic redirects.
Search engines stop indexing content and backlinks when they detect 404 error messages.
Sometimes this process can be extensive. Create a plan with your web designer to map out all needed redirects. Ideally, this should happen before the launch of your new site, and your web designer should know how to tackle this. If it’s done after the relaunch, you’ll lose much of your progress. Neither you nor your web designer should work toward a hasty relaunch without considering this issue and creating a solid plan. If you do, you’ll face unfortunate regrets.
4. Ask How they Monitor the Success of the New Website
Any issues that result from the redesign’s launch need to get solved quickly. If not, they can damage your SEO and search engines’ ability to crawl your sign accurately.
Successful SEO takes time. Make sure your web design company has the skills to create the results you want to see. You want to measure your new site’s performance so you can understand how it helps you reach goals.
For example, our Maui web design company sends regular updates to clients. We work with them to create an optimized website and we follow through to ensure that it sees improvements. Our goal is to watch businesses meet and exceed their goals. If you want to learn more about how we handle expert website redesigns, reach out to us today!
Further Reading: Why Small Businesses Need a Hawaii Digital Marketing Agency
Photos Courtesy of Keith Luke, KOBU Agency, & Elizeu Dias