Keeping content constant
Monday, November 29th, 2010By Rob Stanbridge, Head of SEO
It is logical that a business website should reflect the growth of a company as it develops and changes over time. But major changes to certain aspects of your website can have a negative impact on others.
Client case study
Clickthinking was recently tasked with a SEO health check for a client’s website that was launched in March 2009. We found that overall traffic to the site steadily increased due to several offline campaigns and heightened brand awareness of the clients’ core products (see the graph below). Initially the website made good inroads into organic search engine listings.
After three months a decision was made to re-structure the product offering on the website and many of the content pages were changed or removed. This exercise was repeated again six months later.
The overall effect of these changes was extremely detrimental to our client’s organic search listings. The graph below shows organic traffic to the website for a sample of non brand related keywords. There are two distinct peaks followed by a drop off in traffic that coincides with the dates of the content reshuffle.
This serves as an excellent example of how critical it is to keep your website content consistent and accessible to search engines. Note that this does not refer to minor updates of certain pages, for example a News page. Adding fresh content is obviously crucial to keeping your visitors engaged and is also an important component of SEO. The example above refers to a major content swap where large sections of the site were changed or removed.
Best of both
There are smart ways to change or remove content without compromising search engine listings and potential traffic. Rather than completely substituting existing content, my recommendation would be to consult an expert and strategise how best to incorporate changes without damaging your online exposure.
The same principle applies when a website is due for a design overhaul. Two critical performance indicators in the success of design and content restructuring are how the search equity of the outgoing website pages is retained and transferred across to the new pages.
At Clickthinking we often come across website owners who acknowledge that their sites are dated in design and functionality, but are worried they will lose search engines listings with the launch of a new site. It’s important to strike a balance in your web strategy. Fresh content will do nothing to boost your online image if it doesn’t rank well with search engines, and a high search listing is no good if it takes users to an unattractive or outdated website.
The lesson to be learnt from our client’s case study is to always plan for major changes to a business website. If properly planned and executed, your website can stay ahead of the game and retain its historical search engine presence at the same time.
