I keep talking to companies that have rebuilt their website and lost a bunch of their Google search traffic. It's so common. In my experience, I would say 90% of the time an organisation rebuilds their website, they lose a significant amount of their rankings in Google and it's always for the same reason and it's entirely avoidable, unfortunately.
Typically when I'm talking to these companies, it's after they've already rebuilt their website and lost their ranking. Now typically we can get most of their ranking back pretty quickly, but I wanna talk about how you can avoid this in the first place with a little bit of simple planning. So most of the time when a company rebuilds their website and loses ranking, they think, oh, I guess our pages aren't as optimized as they were on the old website.
Maybe we didn't get the right keyword in our meta title or our H1. And that definitely can happen. But if anyone in the organization has any understanding of SEO, it's rare that that one's missed.
The thing that is often missed even by SEO agencies is removing pages or changing URLs. And it's important to understand that from Google's point of view, if you change a URL, you did remove the page and you created a new page. If you want to rebuild your website without losing any of your ranking or Google search traffic, you need to catalog every URL on your website that receives any amount Of search traffic and make sure that URL still exists on your new website.
As long as the content on the page is similar, you still have the keyword in your H1 and your meta title, you shouldn't lose a significant amount of ranking. In most cases you'll actually gain ranking. This is because typically if you make significant site wide changes to your website this will force Google to re evaluate the content of your site.
So if you've been working on your content or you have more authority than the last time Google evaluated your site you're likely to see a boost in ranking. However, even after learning this I often hear organisations say ah we still wanna remove all these pages cause we want our new site to be clean but with a good site structure you don't have to choose between a clean website and keeping your pages but if you have pages ranking in Google and then you remove that page or change the URL you will lose that ranking.
Now occasionally a new page will start ranking for that term but it's rare. If you want to keep your ranking you need to keep your pages. If you absolutely must remove a page or change a URL then you want to set up a redirect to the most relevant existing page.
However, this is another thing that people commonly misunderstand. If the page you're redirecting to is not relevant for the term you were Ranking for you're still not gonna rank for that term and the redirects probably not gonna help you much at all the most common and egregious version of this is redirecting all the old pages to your new homepage.
You think you're aggregating all the authority and relevance of your old pages onto your homepage but your homepage isn't targeting the same terms that those pages were so all those rankings and all that authority is just lost those are what's called soft 404s in other words, you might as well just remove the pages and let them 404.
