Here’s a scenario: You’re redesigning a site – maybe it’s yours or your client’s site – and you’re concerned about how the redesign is going to affect your current SEO state. The redesign is anticipated to launch about 6 months to a year. You decide that, to make things easier for your “redesign,” and for fear of becoming a victim of another Panda update, you hold off on all of your SEO optimization until the redesign is done. Which means no content updates and no on-page or off-page optimization, among other SEO campaigns you’re running on the site. And to make it fair in your mind, you plan on saving or cataloging your content so that you can maintain that “ranking content” when your site goes live. Sounds like a plan, right?

As the words of one of the greatest rappers of all time, LL Cool J, plainly put it: “I don’t think so.” And here are reasons why it’s a bad idea to postpone your SEO:

Content is STILL King

Your content still matters to your audience, and by that measure alone should be reasons why you cannot stop your SEO. You need to be able to continually revise your content to increase your exposure and engage/re-engage your audience into your site. If halting your SEO campaigns for a period of time is your choice of measure, you’re not updating your site with fresh, relevant and usable content for your audience. Think about the long-term snowball effect this has on your content production: stale content over a fixed long-term range can damage your content appeal to your users, which will force users to look elsewhere for what they need to find. When users look elsewhere for the content they need, search engines won’t see your site and your content as relevant and useful to the users looking for it. This will force your content to be perceived as little value by search engines, primarily Google, and thus your page ranks and perceived value will decline.

Metrics? We Don’t Need No Stinking Metrics?

That’s exactly what is going to happen when your SEO is postponed: your metrics will be shot. I can’t say for every site that your traffic, page views, conversions, etc. will fall dramatically, nor do I guarantee that at all. However, I do know that you will experience a drop or dip in some way, shape or form on your site. How dramatic of a drop will depend on how long the redesign will take, how big of a redesign your site will span, and the number of pages will be affected.

It should be noted that your metrics and analytic reports should be part of the equation when planning on redesigning while postponing your SEO. If metrics are not part of the marketing strategy behind this redesign, then I suggest educating your managers, directors, and/or executives on the potential issues that will show up on your reports. Make them aware of what will happen before and after the work stoppage and how much work it will take to get back into the search game.

Bye, Bye, Bye (Rankings)

Google has stated that they take into consideration user interaction and engagement towards your content in its algorithm to determine site rank, weight, and overall value. If your users don’t see your site to be relevant in the time that you do the redesign, search engines will take note of that and use it against you. By not changing and refreshing your content over that period of time, you’re providing your users with more useless, irrelevant information that, in this “give it to me now” day and age, will be seen as “so 10 minutes ago.” Not engaging your users with relevant, up-to-date information, you’re more than likely going to lose your rankings and your search exposure due to stale, unchanging and boring content.

Redesigns And SEO Can Co-Exist, But Only If Your Managers Know How

I know this for a fact that redesigns and SEO can work together and in unison. I have done it as a Senior SEO Specialist for a marketing agency, working with content developers, designers and developers, and IT to create redesigns, newer/fresher content, along with revamped on-page and off-page optimization. It’s not too difficult to do in most respects, but the knowledge and best practices of managing your redesign and SEO should be passed on from the top down. Think about it: If you’re an SEO expert in your company, and you’re told to stop your SEO campaigns/optimization because of a redesign, and the reasons given to you are a load of crap by industry standards, then it looks like the managers, directors, or C-level executives responsible do not know the massive implications of this tactic.

You’re Not Using Technical Assistance That Can Help Your SEO

Are your managers and directors not helping you argue and protect your SEO investments? Your managers are probably afraid that by doing the redesign, they’re going to screw up any optimization (and results from those optimization campaigns) already done throughout the site, such as keyword-rich URLs, title and description tags, landing pages, etc. If that’s the case, let your IT team help out with 301 and 302 redirects during and after the redesign. This will help your site get positioned to visibility while your managing the redesign and the work after that has transpired. Moreover, sitemap submissions conducted on a regular basis will keep spiders up-to-date on what’s hot and what’s not on your site, including relevant temporary or permanent redirects that can push your older contents aside for fresher meat.

Social Media Won’t Be Enough To Replace Your Search Position

If you think that pure social media alone will help you offset your SEO, think again. Do you really think that tweeting and posting content on your social platforms pointing to your outdated site is going to make your site have a stronger relevancy on your searches? Do you really expect to push old and stale content to your users who are looking to the here and now? Social media needs updated content just as much as SEO does, and the integration of two will create more firepower for your brand online. So why screw your SEO campaigns over?

You’re Screwing The SEO Work Previously Done To Get You Where You Are

By conducting SEO stoppage on your site, you’re basically screwing the work that was previously done to get where you are on a search visibility scale. If you’re the marketing genius who wanted to stop the site from being optimized while you’re redesigning, do you really think that picking it up again later on (whether it’s 6 months, 1 year or worse) will put you back in the map automatically?

If you’re the SEO person, content writer, or SEO team involved (or chosen to NOT be involved) in this predicament, are you already conducting a short-term and long-term strategy to help decrease the time that you’ll be gone from your user’s search? If not, I believe that you and/or your team should have a back-up plan, and plan it well.

You’re Screwing Your SEO Foundation, Then Starting From Scratch

SEO is the grounds that hold the foundation of your online marketing. Halting and restarting your SEO campaign is like taking out the foundation of your existing house, and then re-building the foundation under the weight of the existing house. It’s going to take a lot more effort from an SEO perspective to get back the ranking and relevancy you would lose if you were to continue to halt your campaigns. Imagine the amount of work that your content marketers, SEO specialists and other online marketers will have to do to ramp up back to the relevancy that you probably enjoy now. Now, imagine the time it will take for that work to actually produce fruit for your site.

My Conclusion

If it was up to me, I would not halt any SEO work during a redesign at all. Not now, and not ever. If you’re not too concerned about SEO like some companies I know of, then this is up to you to conduct and likely at your own risk. However, if you are concerned about your overall visibility and you’re conducting the halt anyway, then I suggest  conducting a vast project management and risk assessment before proceeding with your redesign project. Having a solid SEO strategy for your website is great for long-term benefits, but these long-term benefits depend on your short-term work. If your short-term work involves no SEO whatsoever, then your long-term SEO strategies are useless, like microphones given to Milli Vanilli.

It’s 2011.  There is a new day and age in technology, in how we do business, and in how we interact with others on a macro and micro scale.  Yet, here we are, recycling the same old marketing schemes over and over again.

I’m referring to the phrase “Click Here.”  I wrote a marketing article a couple of years ago emphasizing our need to back away from our usage of that 1999 phrase and be more proactive in our call-to-action messages and methods of cultivating customer relationships. Sadly, that proactive emphasis has gone to deaf ears, as I still continue to see such unattractive and non-engaging verbiage in many sites and many campaigns. Continue Reading »

I JUST had a conversation with a print marketing writer about her job and responsibilities, and of course, how she’s faring up with writing for content online.  She gave me the “what’s the difference” speech, so of course, I had to bust out my teacher hat and give her the scoop.  Of course there are differences in print and online content, and while there are many that can be considered, there are a few that I believe are very important to consider:

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I’ve had multiple conversations in the past few days about the foundations of web design in a marketing-centric world, and it’s very interesting to hear other people’s take on the effectiveness of web site design.  I’ve talked to one who was completely downplaying site design and instead focusing on content mostly, and on the other extreme, I’ve had back and forth discussions with one whom site design is the key to a relevant marketable site.  So, is there a right or wrong answer?  While I believe that relevant content is definitely going to keep the user in the site, the design plays a role in determining whether or not the user is going to even want to try to stay there.   Here’s my 2 cents:

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What is your favorite/top ten applications that you use for marketing?  Or maybe I should phrase it this way: What applications would you use if you were going to use it for marketing?  What are the requirements and prerequisites of these applications to qualify? Exposure?  Usability?  Marketability?  Communication reach?  etc…  And this is just excluding any type of word of mouth and/or guerilla marketing…

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A friend of mine back in Seattle retweeted a URL a few days ago about using Twitter for marketing and PR, and the main page has very insightful thoughts and commentary about the issue.  In fact, I laughed out loud at this site, and I could tell it has great marketing presence to it.  What is very interesting (and funny) to me is how this site is questioning the usage of Twitter.  Let me explain.

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I read an article from Wired.com regarding the outdated use of blogging [see Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004], and I really didn’t want to have to blog about this issue; but after contemplating it for a couple of days, I realized I had the duty to do so. So here it goes.

First off, let me summarize what the article is saying about blogs.

1) Blogs were a freshwater of great scenery for self-expression. Now it is nothing but “paid bilge.”
2) “Blogs are now too big, too impersonal, and lacks intimacy”
3) Blogs draw the lowest common denominator: the insult commentator
4) Multimedia sites are as easy and as idiot-free as blogs

Now let’s quantify that summary.

1. Blogs were a freshwater of great scenery for self-expression. Now it is nothing but “paid bilge. This I can agree with nowadays. Within 2002-2004, most of the bloggers were amateurs who wanted to express their opinions with little to no knowledge of online marketing. Content development were not as targeted and focused on marketing as it is now. In fact, “paid bilge” was not even a question when it comes to blogging at this time, as most people did not really have a clue on what to make out of the online marketing scene, let alone anything else. When blogging came out, Google’s search results were full of such blogs. And now, “professional bloggers” have replaced amateurs and newbies, and online marketers such as yours truly are seen more and more on search results than personal blogs. So this is nothing new.

2. “Blogs are now too big, too impersonal, and lacks intimacy.” Sure, blogs can be too big, but that also depends on the company/person/market creating the blog. “Little” blogs like mine and the thousands (if not millions) of blogs out there that are run by smaller companies rely on blogs that are personal, targeted, and more intimate than your “normal” corporate blog. The defining characteristic of a blog in today’s market (for any business) is to appeal to the audience of the writer, whether big or small, and in order to generate business, revenue, and customers, blogs have to be targeted, personal, and intimate. To see that someone is saying that blogs are “too big, too impersonal and lack[ing] intimacy” is not fully realizing that blogs are still worth their value, for both personal and more corporate-oriented blogs.

3. Blogs draw the lowest common denominator: the insult commentator. While it is true that some blogs get the insult commentator, again, it also depends on the blog. Blogs and newspapers are alike in its ability to aggregate wisecracks from people submitting their opinions, just as anybody is susceptible to garnering smart mouths when spoken to in normal conversations. And the insult commentator could be that awful spam that you get in every inbox you have. Just like with any technology, there are flaws associated with technological advancements, and blogs are no exception.

4. Multimedia sites are as easy and as idiot-free as blogs. Hmm… I beg to differ on that one. Are we talking about users who have VERY basic technology knowledge, users with SOME knowledge of technology, or POWER users? I know of people who don’t even have Facebook and Myspace accounts because they don’t know how to use them, let alone using Twitter, Flickr, or any other social media applications. Why should blogs be any different? I mean, I personally know and have seen bloggers who use blogs for marketing, and yet have NO IDEA on how to market their blogs EFFECTIVELY. None of them knew anything about search engine optimization or any marketing tactics, or even know how to write blogs in a manner that is worthy of online content development. So if blogs are supposed to be easy, would Twitter be any different to those who do not even know how to use blogs? Idiot-free indeed.

As an online marketer, I think that it is absurd to say that blogging is out and done. If blogging was out and done, the author of that blog wouldn’t have written that blog from the beginning. If anything, Wired.com’s blog was very tactful in its words, and not just because of conviction of the downfall of the blog, but the blog in and of itself will produce repercussions and consequences in search engines, Wired.com’s networks, and any technologically-based site that is connected to the subject. Those consequences, if that is all the proper word to say, are that tech blogs – small, medium or large – or even microblogs, will be chatting about the subject, driving traffic to Wired.com’s post whether in good terms or bad.

That is how blog works. That is how online marketing works.

Ingenius. :D