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SEO help for website rebuild?
Hey! I work for a small business and I am by default the tech expert for my company. We just had our website rebuilt. We did our best to keep some of the old website structure, but the site was such a mess that we had to completely rebuild. We seem to be taking a big hit in organic SEO traffic. I am trying my best to update and improve things, but I am starting to think I may be over my head. Should I hire an outside expert? Should we invest semrush or other 3rd party plugins?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated
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1 Reply
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There are so many different elements that could be affecting things. You might want to consult with someone for guidance.
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Website rebuild can be no easy task if you don’t know what you’re doing with SEO — it’s a lot of things here and there that can be missed.
You should probably get someone to help you with that if you’re concerned about taking a hit.
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I’d start with making sure all the old URLs redirect to the best new URL alternative. If that’s OK, but organic traffic remains down significantly then you should consider hiring an SEO.
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What platform are you using? WordPress has some good 404 monitors and you can see who is coming to your site looking for a page that’s moved or missing and then 301 redirect them to an appropriate place in the new structure.
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It really depends on what was removed vs rebuilt. Do you have any way to compare the old text to the new?
Possibly use Wayback machine etc but try to find out what text was removed 1st.
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Thank you for all the advice! What are some good platforms to look for freelance SEO professional? We are a small business so budget is not unlimited, Website is the-polar dot com
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Did you run a cull crawl of the old site before switching? Or keep a backup somewhere of the old site? It’s going to be really hard to know for someone coming in what happened without the old URL structure
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Run a free Ahrefs audit to see if you can find all of the broken links and other problems. Connect the site to google search console to see what problems they think you have. That should pretty much cover it.
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301s, removed content, site structure changes and site performance could be one, some or all of your issues (usually). If you aren’t comfortable looking into that, look into contracting someone.
Also, put up a test version of the old site and crawl it for comparison (if you didn’t just nuke the old site).
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Maybe you messed up with link structure, with page URLs without doing the appropriate redirections. Maybe you didn’t fully setup stuff like Schema or the new website is slow. Or you didn’t write a title tag and a description on your pages. Migrations suck and sometimes it takes time to fix it.
I remember I had a client who rebuilt his website from Clickfunnels to Webflow (a good decision) but did a shit job at keeping all the SEO intact. It took me like 6 weeks to fix it.
Do you, by any chance have a copy of the old site? If not, try to setup Ahrefs webmasters tools. It’s free and will give you insights on what may be broken. Screamingfrog also does that.
Don’t pay for SEMrush yet, their balue comes from keywords and they are not your problem yet.
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Are you getting any warnings in Search Console ?
Make sure old urls are redirecting to its new respective counterpart – emphasis on any **quality** backlinks
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In your situation, hiring an outside SEO expert, only for a few hours, can be helpful. They can assess your website, identify issues, and provide guidance tailored to your business. Using SEO tools (many out there) can provide valuable insights. Good luck!
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You may want to speak with a company that can help with the SEO project.
Seems like once it’s back on track, you will have the expertise to keep up with the work…..
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