An effective website is a work in progress.
The content changes to reflect the evolution in your business; your offerings, even your target clients. But sometimes changes can quite innocently have a catastrophic impact on your website’s sales effectiveness.
Let’s examine which changes to your site can impact its sales effectiveness:
Change a few words…
As innocent as changing a few words sounds, it can alter the page’s “keyword profile” – signature text that a search engine sees for the site / page.
The keyword profile correlates with the searches that your site will rank for. If your edits change the keyword profile sufficiently that the site is no long presenting to searches that present prospective clients, then there is a genuine possibility of impact on sales.
Keyword profile is not something to be casually fiddled with.
Change a filename or directory
If you completely rehash your site then the individual page file names or even directories are likely to change.
Generally this is not a problem unless of course, you’re lucky enough to have an inbound link to that page. Suddenly your luck changes because the inbound link doesn’t connect to your site anymore which has a number of potenial consequences including:
Lost referral visitors
A good link would have brought visitors to your site, but not anymore! You’ve unknowingly slammed the door shut on those prospective clients. Goodbye sales.
If you’ve got Analytics at elast you’ll know exactly how many referrals you just lost 
PageRank
Google’s quality score PageRank is directly related to inbound links.
If you loose one or more links it may negatively impact your PageRank which in turn will loose ranking in Google.
The worst thing about PageRank changes is that they happen so infrequently that often its difficult to correlate PageRank changes with the actual cause. The othe rbad thing is that they take a long time to recover from too!
Trying to play catch up on lost Googel PageRank is an unpleasant and financially painful experience.
Keyword profile
Page file & directory names and link tags all have influence on your keyword profile so you may have unknowing skewed your website’s keyword profile further.
Damage control
Well it’s not all bad news; there are a few things you can do to be prepared and an important part of that is being aware of the risks and managing them appropriately.
Which pages rank?
Understanding which pages in your site actually rank and what keywords they rank for is extremely important in these situations.
Typically your home page will rank highest because it normally has the best PageRank, but often the page that attracts prospective clients is another page altogether! I kid you not!
Google a range of keywords you think clients will use and see which pages rank for each keyword.
Chances are they will be different pages in your site.
If you are really organised you’ll have Google Analytics installed and it’s a no-brainer – you can see your best perofming keywrods and then just check their ranking.
The strategy here is to preserve the ranking pages at all cost; so think twice before modifying them.
Get advice from a professional rather than compromising your sales.
Finding your inbound links
There are several methods but here’s a couple:
- The link: command in Google
i.e. in the Google search bar type link:<your website address>
Note that Link: is quick but not always comprehensive. - Google Webmasters Tools
This environment allows you to see and set characteristics about your website in Google’s infrastructure. You need a website developer or an internet marketer to commission
Google Webmasters Tools for you.
You can then download a detailed link showing all inbound links and their landing page in your site.
This is a more authoritive approach being straight from the horse’s mouth.
Protecting inbound links
Now you’ve identified your links get your web developer to set redirects from the linked pages to its replacement page.
A 301 redirect will preserve your valuable PageRank from the incoming link and also automatically redirect incoming visitors to the right page so they can still buy from you.
In summary:
Don’t be reckless about making major changes if your site performs well.
Having access to information and expertise can reduce the impact of changes
If your site doesn’t perform well then you probably need to make changes anyway!
Assign your website a sales budget
Treat your website like a sales person. Set a budget and demand results.
Investigate why if it fails to meet the budget. Bang the table. Make it happen!
This artcle was originally published in the Succinct Update Newsletter Dec 08
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