Websites get outdated, need a face lift or are in need of new features every few years. This is a natural progression for companies wanting to give their clients a quality user experience. Where companies get into trouble is that with all of the thought and effort being placed into design and functionality there is too often little thought placed into SEO. Not thinking about how search engine friendly your website is until after it’s been built could cost you plenty of cash in the long run.
Build it properly from the ground up
Making your site search engine friendly right from the beginning will help to save money as you’re not going to have to go back to your developers twice to fix issues which could have easily been dealt with at the start of the project. You don’t want to wait until after you have already launched your new site to figure out why search engines are giving it the cold shoulder.
Time is money
By the time you figure out that your website is under performing, a number of months have probably already passed. This is time where your site wasn’t able to capture the traffic that it may have otherwise obtained.
Even when you have recognized that there is a problem, changes very rarely happen quickly within the development world. This is even more true when it comes to large corporate websites where even the smallest changes need multiple levels of approval before they are executed. When everything is all said and done, how many months will have past and how many potential sales will have been lost before the changes are corrected?
By getting an expert in SEO involved, your development team should consult with them not only at the start of the project, but also through various stages of development. This will ensure that everyone is on the same track and the website has the best chance of success.
Switching from your old site to your new site
You’re not only going to need think about SEO when it comes to building the site, but you also have to think about what’s going to happen when you switching to a new site. One of the largest issues that occur during a site switchover is maintaining the link juice that the old pages may have acquired over time. You’re going to need to implement a plan of using 301 Permanent Redirects pointing from where your pages formerly existed to where they currently exist.
Building a new website is an expensive proposition and it’s easy for companies to forget about SEO until down the road. But if your company follows this path by not having someone knowledgeable about SEO involved from the start of the project, you may be losing out a lot more money in the months and years to come.
