Question related to SEO impact of site redesign

Your ranking for Italy bus tours will go down some. Your income from that page will go down a lot. You'll have to compensate with extra backlinks.

Why change something that doesn't need changing? People are only going to type in the domain name anyway.

Hi strangeasangels,

Web designers often think the only thing that impacts conversions is web design, while SEO specialist tend to think the only thing that impacts traffic are keywords. To a certain degree both are right, yet compromises must be made.

You need to point out to the web designer that a key principle of design is that "form follows function". It does not matter how great a web design does it's job of conversion, it cannot convert a visitor that never arrives at the page. Keywords are an essential element for any page that you want people to be able to find using a search engine.

Challenge your web designer to do such a great job on his design that it doesn't matter the the anchor text includes relevant keywords. "form must follow function".

Many marketers create specialized landing pages that reduce or completely eliminate navigation menus. It does indeed improve conversion rates when you remove distractions, but you will need to find another way to get users to your page. Specialized landing pages are most often used for traffic that come from channels other than Organic search, like display ads or search ads.

Perhaps you could ask the designer to do 2 variants? Keep your SEO optimized pages navigation links as is, for traffic generation, and create separate landing pages for high conversion rates. There is no reason that you cannot create addition pages for better conversions while keeping the current content with SEO internal link structure in place to maintain search rankings. This is a common approach that is in use by many businesses.

I totally agree with the other comments about keeping the same internal keyword/link structure.

Another important thing to consider is make sure all the URL's of the new website match the old page URLs, or at least there are rewrites in place so the old page URL's go to the new pages. (I've seen alot of web devs mess this up big time over the years)

If havent already got one, get a keyword tracker like proranktracker, you can see day by day which pages are ranking for what keyword and keep an eye on what happens on switchover.

A few weeks ago we had a guy that had a designer really wreck his site SEO wise. It took several hours of working with him to track down all the problems but I was finally able to correct the issues.

A designer should NOT touch anchor text in links or do anything in regard to site architecture without someone versed in SEO advising him (its a 2-3 hour job or less in some cases). There's really nothing drastically simpler about dropping the word Italy and it drops the targeted relevance.

Every now and again we have to deal with designers whose primary concerns are web standards and whatever they think is "clean" this month and they entirely miss the point that the site they are working on is about making money for the business not satisfying their tastes.

This is potentially your client base he might mess with. Ask any business person worth more than their weight would they like simpler anchor text or more customers.

not a one will chose anything but more customers.

Now if he gets idea about your URl structure like this other designer I mentioned before did - you could be having to down staff because of lost income.

Lol, web designers can seriously wreck a site (SEO).

It's like handing your house keys to a home interior designer and you come home to a collapsed roof because the designer thought the place would look better without structural walls.

Pretty doesn't rank pages.

Thanks, everyone for your feedback. It basically confirmed what I already knew. Ranking factors change. I suspected this hadn't but wanted to at least get confirmation from other SEOs before I objected to what the designer was proposing. This forum is awesome!