5 Questions to Ask Your Web Designer About SEO
This article is especially for clients who have an existing website and are hiring a web designer for a redesign. These five questions are meant to help you understand if your web designer knows about SEO or not. Based on your designer’s answers you will know if they will preserve your rankings and improve your SEO or if you should budget for additional help (like our SEO Service).
Will My Web Designer Keep My SEO Rankings Intact?
Handling SEO carefully in a redesign is critically important if your current site ranks well and Google is a major source of your inquiries.
A website designer who is knowledgable in best SEO practices will ensure that your old domain is properly redirected, and all SEO value passed to your new site.
If this is done wrong, your rankings will likely drop significantly.
Will you transfer my content to my new website?
What you want to hear: “Yes, and we will check it for broken images and broken links, to make sure it’s fully, completely transferred.”
Why: An archive of high-quality content is great for your search engine rankings. It makes your site look more established and it provides more content for Google to analyze and index.
You should always check your Google Analytics to see which posts and pages on your old site are bringing you traffic. You may have old blog posts that are actually bringing in decent search engine traffic for you. When you migrate that content to your new site and redirect the old URLs, you will not lose any of that valuable traffic.
2. Will you redirect all my old URLs ?
What you want to hear: “Yes. We will make sure to review your sitemap of all the pages on your old website and make sure those URLs are redirected on the new site.”
Why: Google has listed all your old URLs in the search results and analyzed the value of those pages. If you don’t redirect URLs, you will lose any SEO value assigned to the old pages and essentially have to “start over” with Google.
As an example, let’s say your old About page was yoursite.com/about but now it is called yoursite.com/meet-us. You need to make sure /about redirects to /meet-us after launch.
You don’t want your website visitors to end up on broken pages. Someone may have linked to your old About page or an old blog post. If a visitor clicks that link, do you really want them to end up on a 404 page?
A professional web designer redirects all the URLs on your old site to your new website.
3. What exactly will you do to help my website’s SEO?
What you want to hear: “Here is a detailed action plan of the extensive SEO work we will perform for your new website.”
Why: So many people tell me “My designer is doing SEO for my new site” but I don’t think they really understand the extent of the work or the results they should expect.
Just because you’re being told your new site is “SEO friendly” or involves “keywords” doesn’t mean it will actually rank better on Google.
A web professional with a strategic SEO plan would go through some of these steps:
Keyword research, to help you identify keyword opportunities
A keyword to page map, showing which keywords they’re optimizing for on which pages
Editing and optimizing the content you provide to better include keywords and keyword variations
Writing custom SEO titles and descriptions for your most important pages
Resizing and compressing images for faster load speed
Renaming image filenames before uploading
Adding image alt text on home page and other major pages
Set up and configuration of Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress or Showit
Setting up the site as a secured HTTPS site
Redirecting old URLs
4. Will you audit my finished website for broken links?
What you want to hear: “Yes, we will run your site through a broken link checker before launch.”
Why: Broken links and images on a website are a quality issue. By broken link, I mean linking to a page on your site that no longer exists or linking off your site to another website that no longer exists.
A good broken link checker will find these issues and your web designer will fix the links to avoid Google’s crawler or your visitors from reaching dead ends when clicking.
5. Do you have any examples of how a new website has helped a past client’s SEO?
What you want to hear: “Yes, here is a past client’s site whose organic search traffic increased after launch.”
Why: If a web designer is promising that your new website will help your search engine rankings, they should have evidence they’ve done it before.
Evidence could come in a few forms:
A screenshot of Google Analytics showing an increase in organic search traffic after launch.
A tracking of ranking improvement using a rank tracking tool
A couple examples of websites that rank on the first two pages of Google for important keywords
Explore more
• 10 Ways to Rank Higher on Google
• Premium Squarespace Templates for Female Entrepreneurs in 2024
Your designer
I'm Sharon Calle, a Squarespace website designer and founder of Luminosa Creative. I work with inspired women entrepreneurs and small businesses to help them grow profitable and sustainable brands. To work with me get in touch here.