6 Ways To Harm Your Business When Updating Your Website

Updating and redeveloping an organisation’s website is almost an inevitability these days. Whether the aim is to add new content sections, comply with legislation, provide a new ‘look & feel’ or because of business changes (such as merger & acquisitions)… a web presence is likely to go through some form of significant change or two in its lifetime.

But the way in which you upgrade and rebuild your site can have a big effect on your business, and more specifically how your rank organically in the major search engines. Organic traffic for most sites makes up between 30% to 50% of all visits and applying changes that affects this traffic means you get less visits, leads or conversions.

So here are 6 of the biggest ways to harm your online search traffic and therefore your key online business metrics in the process:

1. Change the domain
   Your organisation’s domain is a brand asset and changing it means losing all the search engine reputation it may have built-up over time. On the flip-side, if your domain has been significantly tainted by bad (black hat) SEO practices in the past, it may be best to start from scratch again with a fresh URL. 
2. Change the user experience
   A change in the site design, the navigation, the directory structure you use and many other factors can influence how your site ranks. 
3. Change the content
   Not all online content is created equal. The way your copy is written can have a major influence on how your site is indexed and then ranked online.. from its relevance to the search term(s) to the way the text is structured. However, a new web presence is an opportunity to review all of your content (including your images and the meta content behind the scenes). 
4. Change the hosting platform
   Migrating from one website host to another may seem like a simple task. But where and how you host your website can have an effect on how you rank in Google, Yahoo, etc. especially if the hosting is slow or not located in the country / region where your customers (and target search engines) are. 
5. Ignore web standards
   It takes hard work and determined effort to deliver a new website, especially if you have tight timescales to deliver to. And the area that can get compromised include: the quality of the code, the compliance to accessibility, the use of ‘alt’ tags for image alternatives, etc. In other words, a failure to follow web standards can have a negative impact on your site’s rankings in search engines.
6. Re-launch it incorrectly
   Sites fail to launch properly in all sorts of ways, from failing to cut-over all content correctly through to not getting the new site indexed in Google as quickly as possible… you are never going to get a second chance to make a first impression on the main search engines.

The Dark Side of Content Marketing

I sometimes blog about the more shady side of Internet Marketing and how you should avoid this sort of stuff (if at all possible).
Buying email lists, Black Hat SEO and other nefarious activities are still used though... primarily for short-term gains and only by some digital folk. Despite all the guidance of search engines, advice from reputable online agencies and contributions from best-practice consultants, there is still a fair bit of shadiness still used (and some clients even encourage it).

Content Marketing on the other hand is the discipline of creating and sharing content for the purpose of communicating, educating and informing prospect, customers and anyone else really. The art of great copy writing, coupled with great UX skills and fantastic creativity is rewarded in engaged eyeballs and influenced sales.

But I have been considering recently whether there a dark side to Content Marketing. Activity that isn't entirely legitimate, but that has yet to be defined as dodgy.... yet

Here's some examples I can quickly think of:

1. Writing blog posts with very similar titles & subjects (purely to try and cover a range of search terms for SEO or internal search)
2. Writing unnaturally (either to force a call-to-action or to appeal to search engines with keyword stuffing, repetition, etc.)
3. Creating meaningless (or even completely off-topic) infographics just to encourage their sharing
4. Creating numerous videos from a single original clip and posting them online under different titles and keywords.

Can you think of anything else?

5 ways to spot a crap Content Marketing agency

Content Marketing is this season’s buzz word. Like ‘Social Media’ was a few years back and ‘Web 2.0’ a few years before that… Content Marketing is apparently all the rage now.
Only there’s a big problem with that.

To try and fill the gap between client expectations and delivery of these, a bunch of agencies have recently cropped up offering: Content strategy, Content Marketing, In-bound marketing and the rest. You know the ones… they email you all the time (well, they fill up my ‘Promotions’ tab in Google Mail – which I now treat like a second inbox for spam) and make it seem like they are a reputable company and not just a bunch of people jumping on the latest digital bandwagon.

Yes, there will be the odd one out there who has actually done what they say and possibly for some brands you may have actually heard of. But a lot of them have either just re-purposed their existing Search Engine Optimisation efforts or may have worked out how to do the basics in Google Analytics (e.g. look at in-bound source URLs, print out a PDF of landing page bounce rates, etc.).
So here’s my tips on the ways you can spot a crap content marketing agency:

1. They send you an email such as “understand blogging basics” or “free website content review” when they've not even looked at your site
2. They don’t actually have any content creation and copy writing skills (they typically only offer to suggest blog posts or to analyse what you've already written)
3. They have spelling or consistency mistakes across their website (an obvious sign of poor content quality) 
4. Despite claiming to have been doing “Content Marketing for years” their own twitter feed and blog posts go back less than 12 months.
   (And watch out for the tell-tale sign of sudden flurries of blog posts all written around the same time, and then large gaps where they haven't been bothered)
5. They make wonderful sweeping statements like “you need to increase brand engagement” with no indication of how you actually do this, let alone measure it.

So. Did I miss any points? Let me know.