Today, I’m going to talk to you about one of the most obvious mistakes that people make with their website that can absolutely f*ck with their rankings in search engines, and the traffic, sales and leads that come through them.
This is such an obvious mistake, I can’t fathom why anybody would ever make it in today’s day of search engine optimisation (SEO). It’s so easy to look at the information out there, and there’s so many people saying the same thing, that there’s no way anybody would continue to make this obvious mistake, right? Wrong!
Recently, one of our clients who moved their website to a new agency did exactly this mistake. It’s not the client’s fault, as their business isn’t in the digital marketing industry, it’s something else entirely. They’re great at doing what they do, and we’ve used them before for ourselves, so we know they’re great. It’s the agency they’ve gone to that has made this mistake.
Essentially, the agency they’ve gone to has crippled their website. The worst thing about it is this agency that they’ve gone to advertises on their own website that they do SEO, do digital marketing, they look after their clients’ online presence and make sure they are where they need to be in Google to get the traffic that they need. Clients who run businesses in their own industries don’t know this stuff, and they shouldn’t be expected to know this stuff, but when an agency advertises the fact that they do SEO and they make this mistake, it’s so mind-numbingly obvious that it’s crystal clear they don’t have the first clue about SEO.
Why, then, are they then telling people that they do? Why are they giving clients the false impression that they know what they’re doing, when they bloody well don’t?
My first example of somebody doing this was many years ago. This first example kind of shows how the problem was back then, and then why it’s still happening now. Around seven, eight years ago, we had a client who was, ironically, in technology recruitment. They dealt with web developers and digital marketing people, as they recruited for this industry, so of all the people to make this mistake, it really shouldn’t have been them.
They were based in London, and they hadn’t been with us long, maybe around two years. We were looking after their digital marketing – they had built their website themselves in-house and looked after it themselves, so we were responsible for the SEO, content and rankings, making sure that they were getting more traffic coming into their website, more people making enquiries, more people applying for the jobs that they had and more people using them to list the jobs that they wanted. Everything was going swimmingly, but then they decided they were going to get a new website.
Now, straight away, when somebody says we’re going to get a new website, there’s a series of alarm bells that kick off. The biggest one is about the content. We always say to clients, “please, please don’t delete your content” – all of the content about your industry, about what it is you do, the problems that you solve, the pages that your potential clients are looking for online, don’t delete that. Because if you delete that, all of these pages that people are coming into your website on when they search for it in Google won’t be there anymore, and if it’s not there anymore, it won’t appear in Google. If it doesn’t appear in Google, your clients aren’t going to find it when they look for you, they’re not going to come through to your website, and your traffic will just drop. Your traffic will stop.
Let’s say you’ve got a 10-page website, and those 10 pages are in Google for topics that people are looking for. Then, you delete those 10 pages, and you just have a one-page website. That’s nine pages that have disappeared from Google – nine pages that people could potentially find you on. You just wouldn’t do that. It’s as if you’ve got 10 doors into your business where people are coming in from different parts of the world, or different parts of the country, or different parts of the street – you wouldn’t suddenly break up those doors and go “oh you’re not coming in anymore, I don’t want you coming in so I’m bricking that door up and stopping people finding me”. That would be a stupid thing to do, but that’s what people do when they delete content. They brick up the doors and stop people coming into their website because they just think it’s a good thing to do.
Now, this recruitment company had hundreds, possibly thousands of pages of content. When they got their new website designed, we made it quite clear to them that all of the content from the website had to be ported across to the new one. We looked at the design they were creating and the layout, we made sure everything was working okay on that. I said “yeah, everything’s fine, we’ll do a proper review when it’s gone live as well to make sure everything’s in place, but don’t forget to port all of the content across that we’ve been putting on over these years – make sure all of that goes across and it’s at the same URL, so that when somebody searches for it in Google, they still find it again”.
…and guess what they did.
Yeah, they deleted it all. The whole bloody lot – hundreds, maybe thousands of pages, just deleted.
Funnily enough, when their next report was due, all their traffic had disappeared. All the traffic had disappeared because all of the pages that people were finding in Google when they searched for the problems that they had and this client solved were no longer there, so they were no longer finding them and coming through to the website. As a result, as they weren’t getting any traffic, and all their enquiries had stopped.
This client was very angry about that. We had to go down to London from Ellesmere Port on the train for a meeting with them to explain what had happened, why it had happened and how it could have been prevented.
Now, their in-house web designer who did this – who we made it quite clear to, to not delete all of the content – was meant to be in this meeting. He called in sick that day. We then had to explain to this rather large board of people that the reason their traffic, rankings and enquiries had all suddenly stopped was because they’d deleted all of the content that we’d been adding over the last two years and that they had on their website for however many years before that. We explained that we were quite clear with the web guy to not remove this, and he’d removed it all anyway.
So that was an awkward conversation, but after that, they understood the gravity of what had happened and why it had happened, and they set about fixing it and getting all the content back.
Now, I’ve seen a lot of companies do this over the years, where they’ll have a new website designed and they’ll make this mistake, but it hasn’t happened for a long time – until recently.
We’ve got a client who has been with us at Engage Web for over 10 years, and they are on the first page of Google for all of the phrases that are related to their industry. They’ve got featured snippets for a variety of different phrases related to their industry. In fact, one in particular had brought in something like 55,000 visits to the website over the past six or seven years – 55,000 people had gone through to the website after searching for that particular phrase, which is mental. It’s absolutely bonkers that you can get that level of traffic for a small company that is local to us, and that was just one of many articles they had that was bringing traffic like that.
So, over the 10 years, they had hundreds and hundreds of pages on this website that were bringing people in. Then comes along this new company that was going to design their new website for them, giving them a great detail, and they were going to do their SEO for them too. We said “that’s absolutely fine, thank you for working with us for the past 10 years, but please, whatever you do, make sure you don’t delete all the content, because that content is absolutely critical. Your traffic is just going to stop if you delete all of this content”.
They then said to us “ah, the new company that’s doing it, they said they don’t need the content”.
No, no, no! We had to explain that if they deleted that content, all those thousands and thousands of visitors they were getting every month were just going to stop. They wouldn’t get the rankings or enquiries they were receiving, it would all just cease. Despite this, that company didn’t want the content, they just weren’t interested.
And so they deleted all of the content. This business’s website went from something like a 900-page website to about a 30-page website overnight, and nothing was redirected. They didn’t point any of the pages elsewhere, they just deleted them, and they didn’t even keep the Google Analytics – they didn’t see why they needed the traffic history.
Well, it’s probably a good bloody thing they didn’t keep the traffic history, because if they showed the client where their traffic was and where it is now, they might start asking some questions – and so they should, because all their traffic had gone just like that.
That client’s business was built up in Google by Engage Web for the last decade to be where it was, so that they were getting traffic for all the different queries related to their business and all the different problems that their clients have that they solve, and that has now stopped. It’s all gone because this agency that says they know about SEO, when, in fact, they bloody well don’t, has deleted all the content to the website, ruining their rankings, ruining their traffic, ruining their enquiries, ruining their leads.
Don’t get me wrong, the website they’ve done for them is a nice-looking site, it looks really good – but that’s because they’re a web design agency, not a digital marketing company, and there’s a big difference. No SEO company who knows even the most slightest thing about SEO would have deleted all of that content.
So, if there’s one thing you take out of this article, it should be that if you get a new website, whether you do it yourself, you have your existing web designer do it for you, or you move to a new web designer (which is usually where the problems arrive), do not delete the content you’ve got on your current website.
Always ask your new web designer to make sure that any pages, blogs, features – any pieces of content on your site – are on a corresponding page on the new website, and the content is still there. The last thing you want is to have a brand-new website that looks really cool but nobody can find it because your web designer has absolutely ballsed it up. Make sure that doesn’t happen, or you can destroy the business you’re getting from your website.
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