A new website can give new life to your business.  You will need to put plenty of hours into the new design but all the hard work can quickly pay off. Unfortunately, a new website design can also have negative effects on your search results rankings if you forget to incorporate all of your SEO best practices. Here are some of the common ways businesses screw up their SEO during a website redesign and how you can avoid doing the same thing.

Failing to Optimise Your Images

New images can help to modernise a website but don’t forget that each new image you add will need to be optimised for the search engines. Unoptimised images can cause your website to slow down dramatically and customers hate to wait for pages to load. Run speed tests and make the necessary changes to get your website up to speed.

Using Flash-Based Images

Flash is a no-no, especially now websites need to be mobile friendly. Flash elements aren’t mobile-friendly and many users will not be able to view the site via their mobile devices. Flash also slows down the website just like unoptimised images, play it safe and avoid flash entirely.

Forgetting to Migrate Content

Before creating a new website you’ll need to find the content that provides value. This will be the unique and useful content that targets your audience and includes background content such as meta date and alt text on your images. Strong content and the meta descriptions and other information plays a part in your current organic search traffic result. It is vital that this content is migrated to your new website.

Blocking Search Engines

Failing to allow search engines to crawl the website is a problem that normally occurs when websites are moved to the live server. This mistake can cause a lot of damage and stop traffic from arriving at your website.  When the error is noticed and fixed the traffic to the site can still be slow.

Your New Website Isn’t Mobile Friendly

Seriously, there are no excuses left for not having a mobile-friendly website. If your website doesn’t work perfectly on mobiles you will experience less visibility, less traffic, you’ll rank lower in the search engines and your audience will have usability problems. Even the smallest of businesses have to ensure their website is mobile-friendly.

Do you need a new SEO ready website or help to resolve SEO failings? Contact us and ask about our SEO services.