Managing Content Without Losing Search Rankings. Possible?

Fri, Feb 1, 2019

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Does your website use an antique design? No content or web asset lasts forever. As they age, websites may fail to meet visitors expectations.

Managing Content Without Losing Search Rankings. Possible?

Does your website use an antique design? No content or web asset lasts forever. As they age, websites may fail to meet visitor's expectations, resulting in lower levels of engagement. In a survey conducted among many digital marketing services providers it was found that 75% webmasters believe their websites should be redesigned every one to three years. Since redesigning changes your website's code, as well as the way in which content is presented, it may cause lower search rankings.

Dont Mess With Content

Redesigning your website should only affect its appearance and usability, it shouldn't affect your website's content. If you mess with your website's content during redesign, its search rankings could drop. Maybe you unknowingly deleted a long-form page, or perhaps new design failed to load a section of content. With search engines no longer able to crawl pages or section of content, they will likely rank your website lower and for fewer search queries in the search results.

Preserve Structure

Assuming your website uses descriptive URL slugs with proper hierarchy, changing them isn't beneficial, and may actually prove harmful to your website's search rankings. Traffic Google generates more traffic than Bing. Google accounts for nearly 85% percent of all searches, compared to Bing's 2.5 percent share of the global search engine market. Bing however also powers Yahoo, which accounts for 1.5 percent of all searches. With Yahoo's traffic, Bing reaches about 4 percent of the world's search engine users. Bing's traffic may pale in comparison to Google's, but Microsoft's search engine can still drive thousands or even tens of thousands of new visitors to your website each month.

Returning Visitors

How much of your website's traffic consists of returning visitors? Creating a personalized user experience will compel more visitors to return to your website! Unfortunately, not all visitors will return after their session has ended. Research shows over 80% of a typical website's traffic consists of new visitors. After leaving, these one-time visitors are never seen again! It's frustrating when visitors leave your website and don't come back. Unless a visitor made a purchase or other conversion triggering action during his or her initial session, the visitor won't drive revenue to your site. While some traffic will inevitably consist of new visitors, you can optimize your website for a higher rate of returning visitors in several ways.

Create New Content Regularly

You can attract more returning visitors to your website by creating new content regularly. If your website is rarely updated with new content, few visitors will return to it. Upon discovering your website's outdated content, search engines assume your site is no longer maintained. So, rather than returning to it, visitors will look elsewhere for newer and more relevant content, such as a competitor's website. For a higher rate of returning visitors, try to create at least one new page or post of content each week. With new content each week, your website will offer greater value to visitors. Visitors will see that it's frequently updated with new content, so they are more likely to consider it in the future.

Keywords

Another difference between Google and Bing SEO lies in how they handle keywords. Both search engines look for keyword usage when crawling websites. If a large chunk of your website's content contains a particular keyword, search engines assume your site is relevant to that keyword. Google's algorithm has evolved more deeply than Bing's over the years by focusing on semantics. In other words, Google strives to understand the context of a keyword and how it's used in relation to the surrounding text, whereas Bing simply looks to see whether a keyword is present. To rank high in either of the two major search engines, you need to build backlinks. When planning a search engine optimization strategy, you might be wondering which of the two major search engines you should target. While search engines work in similar ways by crawling websites, there are nuances between their technologies & algorithms. As a result, they require different approaches to SEO. Thanks for reading!