Occasionally we lose customers who have decided to have a nice shiny new website built elsewhere. This makes us sad, but also curious, we are a curious bunch. Sometimes this causes us a dilemma because by default we like to give people the best advice we can. A shiny new website isn’t the cure to all your website woes, in fact it might actually be the start of them.

We like to have a look at these shiny new websites, built elsewhere and you’d be surprised how many don’t even have 301 redirects or even basic meta information or page titles in them – at all, nothing, just empty space waiting to be found and punished by Google search bots.

Planning a new website is complicated and takes time to do properly. You will most likely have some good keyword rankings in Google, but do you know which ones? We take time to analyse and plan migrations to preserve all the good stuff that’s built up in Google and then work to improve what’s not.

This takes time but is worth its weight in gold as far as Google search goes. Sadly, we have to charge for this time, good Digital Marketing isn’t free, which is why sometimes customers see a better deal elsewhere. Sadly, this better deal quite often leaves a trail of destruction behind it in Google which might not be apparent for months and then can take many more months to repair, at great expense and potentially greater cost to your business. Another one of life’s false economies. So don’t be fooled, there may be a shiny new website glowing at you from your computer screen but it’s also what’s behind it that you don’t see that is vitally important. That’s why an agency that takes the time to plan properly and manage this transition is vitally important. If your new agency or designer isn’t talking about this (sometimes boring) stuff then don’t be fooled by the great design, it’s not going to be all it’s cracked up to be once Google comes a crawling.