When it comes to SEO, there are different factors that affect the search engine ranking of a webpage. It may include content, URL changes, loading speed, and more. But, what about your website design and layout. Will it affect your search rankings?
Recently, Google confirmed that web layout and design could affect search rankings. Wondering how? Well, here is a detailed overview.
According to Google, when you are focusing on SEO for lawyers, real estate, or any other small business, a single change in your web layout can cause changes in web rankings, even if the content or URL remains the same. Changing the layout of the web page is something that people actively work on. So, figuring out how to use titles properly on a page, how to do internal linking properly, how to provide more context for the article itself can definitely affect SEO for lawyers or other small businesses.. These changes can cause both positive and negative impacts. So, you need not avoid making changes but ensure that the changes you make are measurable and creating a positive impact on your search results.
Webmasters change their website design for various reasons from removing bugs to improving user engagement. This is a quick way to adopt the latest technology and trends. But, these changes can affect your search rankings depending on how your page is structured according to the search engine guidelines.
One of the primary reasons why there is a change in the website ranking and decline in website traffic during a redesign because Google has to re-evaluate the website with the new design and content in place to improve the SEO for real estate and other small businesses.
Top Reasons Your Website Traffic Dropped After a Design Change
- When redesigning a website, redirects are the most important things to consider. Redirects provide access for the users to the new, improved page and tell search engines to rank the new page in the place of the old one. If it isn’t properly done, it affects the website ranking.
- Site architectures is a critical factor that refers to how the pages are organised and linked together to create the website. Pages that are linked closer to the home page or other important page holds more value. When you redesign a website, the order of these pages changes and the value decreases eventually. It causes them to drop below the threshold needed to rank in the search results.
- When you change the primary and secondary topic of a page, it causes Google to re-evaluate the relevancy of the page for the targeted topic. This makes the score to drop and reduces traffic.
- If you are removing a page from your website to optimise the user journey, it creates a content gap that results in a drop in traffic.
Tips to Reduce the Risk of Traffic Loss
- Make SEO a part of your redesigning process. If you are focusing on SEO for dentist or any other small business, make sure that all the guidelines of SEO are properly integrated throughout the design process to avoid serious issues that result in traffic loss.
- Plan a new site architecture to ensure that all of the valuable information currently on your site has a place on the redesigned version.
- Set up 301 redirects to tell the search engine that your page is permanently moved.
- Create a new sitemap.
The Bottom Line
Changes in the website layout can affect your search rankings of a page. So, the next time you make a change to the layout or design of your website, keep in mind that the search ranking of that may alter once the change is implemented.
'