How Website Design and Development Goes Terribly Wrong
I’ve been working with internet marketing for about fifteen years and I’ve owned a website design agency for almost eight. In that time I’ve witnessed a lot of good, bad, and really ugly when it comes to process flow for SEO and website development.
In most cases, the process fails not due to someone being lazy or malicious. The process fails due to lack of education and lack of communication.
Here are some real-world examples of where I’ve experienced SEO derailing due to a website redesign:
- The wrong people are involved in the website redesign project. By the wrong people I mean either the project is left to the IT department or marketing management and the actual employees who work on SEO are completely left out of the process. You can only protect your SEO if the people responsible for the SEO are active participants in the redesign process.
- Pretty was deemed more important that usability and information. I’ve watched companies hire a high priced web developer who only focused on large images, white space, and today’s trends in design. In doing so they literally removed ¾ of the content, which left nothing for search engines or human visitors to read and digest. Pretty is great, but it only really works if people can actually find and visit the website.
- A firm who relied heavily on SEO hired a New York based design agency that dealt largely with big brands. These brands had decades of exposure and didn’t rely on SEO. Due to this enterprise client list, the agency completely forgot about SEO and hard coded critical elements like meta titles and descriptions. Not every website needs SEO but if your lead funnel depends on it, you have to select a design firm that understands what SEO is and how their tasks plays a critical role in protecting it.
- The agency created a template based on the client PSD files and moved into a soft launch where the client took over the development website and made content updates. The agency created 301 redirects but these were irrelevant once the client modified the URL structure during soft launch. This meant the hard launch at go-live missed a lot of 301 redirects which resulted in 404s and a loss of search ranking and referral traffic.
- In another soft launch scenario the client used a page builder to create lots of pages but in doing so created a mess of subheaders and massive confusion for content hierarchy. If you decided to use page builders or even H1 headers in your CMS editor, make sure you are adhering to best practices and you are using headers to set up an outline for your human visitors and search engines.
- The website design and build process was handed off to someone who didn’t fully understand the CMS software used – in this case WordPress. The freelancer added in page builders and oodles of plugins that overwrote the stock theme’s solid coding and created a cluster of code and low quality SEO. Page content was very heavy in code with little content, CSS formatting was overrode which created accessibility issues, and multiple SEO plugins were creating conflicting information for search engines. Don’t just go for the cheapest freelancer you can find. If SEO helps drive your revenue stream make sure your freelancer understands SEO and the impact their actions will have on your ranking and website traffic.
Did my examples scare you or make you cringe a little? Excellent! Than I have done my job and I’ve educated you enough to ensure you’ll watch your SEO closely and you won’t repeat the sins of other website owners.
