Your website may look beautiful, but does it pack an SEO punch?
In today’s digital climate, having a website is essential. Getting your business online is critical in today’s world no matter what product or service you’re offering. As consumer tastes and needs change so must your website and so many businesses are building new websites to meet these new demands, be it to improve the site’s aesthetics, navigation, functionality, speed or browsing experience. What many businesses fail to realise is that by building a new website, you are in jeopardy of affecting your current online positioning if you change to a new theme that is not consumer friendly or SEO friendly and you don’t carry over all the on page SEO work from your existing website.
How Does My Website Theme Affect My SEO?
Search Engine Optimization, like all digital marketing strategies, is an ever-evolving art form. Google regularly updates its algorithm to meet the changing needs of internet users worldwide and that means digital marketing and SEO strategy needs regular updating, too. Nowadays, a beautiful website is only a small part of a successful one and here’s why:
- Website design can affect speed and speed affects SEO: The way your website is laid out, the number of elements within a page (and what those elements happen to be), pop-ups, links, security features, content length and style, and more can all slow down a website’s response time. And a slow website will automatically rank lower on Google’s and others’ SER pages.
- Poor website design negatively impacts user experience which lowers its SEO: Content aside, a website that’s difficult to navigate, hard to see, confusing, or not user friendly in any way is a major turn-off for visitors, and the habits they develop because of that are readily relayed to Google and translated by them into lower SEO rankings.
- A beautiful-looking website does not necessarily mean a beautifully-coded website. And great SEO requires great coding: Just because your website looks the part, there is still a lot that needs to go on behind the scenes in order to produce quality SEO results. Google doesn’t care about the surface appearance and only uses your website’s coding to “read” the website in order to rank it, so a poorly coded one (or one that simply doesn’t adapt to Google’s ever-changing rules) may still look stunning and appear to be working as it should, but may not necessarily be getting you the best practice SEO strategy you think it is.
How To Choose The Right Website Theme For SEO
Choosing a website theme is first and foremost about making your business look good and providing your customers with the information, products, and services that they need. No matter what website theme or design you choose, make sure that your website is mobile (and tablet) friendly, supports most plug-ins, has well-written, clean coding that meets Google’s latest algorithm requirements, is equally impressive on all internet browsers, and has fast loading speeds. It’s also incredibly important to consistently review and adapt your website and all its elements so that any bugs are properly fixed, any updates needed are done quickly and effectively, and user experience is monitored and updated for improvements on a regular basis.
The Importance of SEO Migration
Even more important to remember is to migrate your SEO work from your current website to your new website to prevent loss of your website’s search engine rankings, traffic and conversions. By performing a stringent SEO migration, you’ll maintain and hopefully improve your organic performance as a result of the new theme and website updates.
But SEO migration is not a simple job that can be done a day before the launch of your new website. It takes rigorous research, planning, execution, and monitoring to ensure your post-launch site maintains and builds as much organic visibility as it can. It takes the resources of digital marketing experts, SEO experts, and web developers to make sure tasks are completed in a correct and timely manner. If you have spent resources and money on getting your website well ranked on search engines, the last thing you want is to lose all the hard work you have done. At this stage it is often best to call in the SEO professionals.
How Peppermint Can Help
Creating, designing and building websites to maximise search engine optimization is complex and time consuming, but we are here to help. As a leading creative and digital marketing agency on the Costa del Sol, our team of graphics designers, web developers, digital marketers, SEO specialists and project managers have years of experience in this field and can guide and support you every step of the way. We are here to ensure that your business succeeds in this digital age. Contact us today to get started!