A lot of clients come to us with older sites that they hate. They want to throw them out and start fresh. But is that really a good idea?
Today, we wanted to talk a little bit about that: what is SEO like for an older website, versus a brand new website?
Even if your old website looks funky, doesn’t perform, and doesn’t show your business in the best light, sometimes it’s best to renovate instead of demolish. Other times, tearing it down and starting from scratch is the clear answer. Here’s a brief look at how things look from our side of the aisle, so you can better understand the factors that go into our recommendations.
SEO Challenges with New Websites
The hardest part about running an SEO campaign for a brand new website is just getting the thing off the ground.
SEO isn’t the fastest process—it often takes 3-4 months of work to start generating the first leads, depending on the market and the competition. A big reason for this is that Google is evaluating your website for the first time. They need to learn the site layout, how users interact with your content, and what the external signals are saying about your website. Even finding those external signals can take some serious time.
Think of it this way: one of the big SEO factors is the quality and quantity of links pointing to your website. When you successfully publish content on another website that links back to yours, it could be weeks or months before Google even notices the link. And it doesn’t count towards your SEO until they do. That’s because Google doesn’t check on every page, on every website, every day. No, really, they don’t.
Take BSR Renovations, a concrete contractor in Tracy, CA. Their full service area includes roughly 12 different cities, from Turlock to Tracy, but we know from experience that building all of those pages at the same time doesn’t do much good. Part of that is because of how often Google rechecks pages: the more pages you have, the more rarely they rescan each one of them.
So instead we focus our efforts on just a few high-priority cities until they’re established. Then we move onto the next set. That allows us to better understand what Google does, and doesn’t, like about those pages before committing to a single approach.
SEO Opportunities with New Websites
The best thing about a new website is that it’s like building a custom home: you can make it any way you want. You still need a dependable contractor (or in this case, SEO provider) to stop you from making mistakes that will cost you down the line, but otherwise you’re in total control.
This was a big part of the appeal for CJ Mobility, a mobility solutions provider in Queen Creek, AZ. They provide a unique mix of wheelchair ramp, wheelchair lift, stair lift and wheelchair repair services to a large service area, ranging from Phoenix to Tucson. While the owner has a lot of hands-on experience, the business itself is relatively new. That means we’re still learning which services work the best in their market, which cities provide the best ROI, and the best way to present the business overall.
For example, mobility solutions are generally for the elderly and people with disabilities, but marketing to each of those segments takes slightly different approaches. For the elderly, the customers are typically their busy children who just want a fast, reliable solution. For people with disabilities, the customers are typically caretakers and people in other support roles. They might have to get signoffs from others to approve the projects, but they typically have more time and more unique needs to work with.
These differences in approach shape the website: what kind of supplemental content we develop, what kind of messaging belongs on the homepage, and what kinds of CTAs people respond to. After all, the priorities of a full-time caretaker or the busy child of an aging parent tend to be very different.
But since all of our new sites are built on a flexible development model, it’s easy to change elements on short notice. We can also easily customize the approach for individual cities and services. For example, people with disabilities are generally more likely to swim for physical therapy, so they’ll generally get more use out of pool lifts. But in Sun City, the large retired community means that it makes more sense to focus on that audience.
Websites built on older development models often don’t have that level of flexibility. You might be stuck with one CTA across the entire site, or one banner image that is impossible to customize. That could easily give the competitive edge to a competitor with a more flexible website. It can also limit what other cities or services you want to add over time, since the original plan was baked into the design and challenging to change. A good custom site doesn’t have that problem.
SEO Challenges with Old Websites
The biggest challenge of running an SEO campaign on an older website is trying to figure out what the previous SEO provider did, and finding the best ways to undo their damage.
In Red White and Blue Construction’s case, a low-quality SEO provider generated hundreds of lower-quality blogs that ruined their other SEO efforts. Then, another SEO provider came along to fix it, but they also made a big mistake: they simply deleted all of the old blog posts. While removing that content is generally a good idea, in practice it created hundreds of broken URLs, leading to 404 pages. If 90% of the pages on your site lead to error pages, Google doesn’t tend to like that.
So, we went through an extensive process of cataloguing and redirecting all of the old posts. It might have increased their organic traffic by 25% in the first month, but I can’t say it was a lot of fun.
Since many SEO providers are fly-by-night, it can also be like pulling teeth to get all the necessary logins to take over the account. It’s pretty common for us to be locked out of old analytics data or social media accounts because no one who has the logins is willing to cooperate. We have a lot of experience flying blind in these situations, but other SEO providers can struggle.
SEO Opportunities with Old Websites
Older websites can also present some unique SEO opportunities.
Take Front Office Solutions, a call answering service for contractors and home service providers. When we first took over the site, it was in rough shape: there were some old-school design choices, a lot of small pages with little-to-no content, and a lot of different blogs and pages targeting the exact same thing. Frankly, it was a mess.
But in this case, it made sense to redo their old website for several big reasons.
First, there was a lot of data to work with. With a new website, it takes a lot of educated guesses to know what content is going to resonate with people, encourage them to click through to other pages, and hopefully convince them to request service from you. With an older site, it’s easy to see which content is generating traffic from Google, how it’s ranking, and how it’s converting. Sometimes you have to read between the lines to understand it all, but that’s just part of the fun.
In FOS’s case, there were several resources worth keeping, like a chart that broke down the cost of a full-time receptionist versus a virtual receptionist. This content received a lot of good engagement despite being stranded on a relatively hard-to-find URL. So we rebuilt it and incorporated it into more important pages instead. The results were strong.
Second, while the site’s visual design was a little funky, it was also built on WordPress using a relatively accessible theme. That made it a lot easier to port over to a significantly better theme without completely rebuilding the site. That saved the owner a lot of money, and helped us generate new leads much sooner.
Last but not least, it helped us keep a lot of the current URL structure. Google ranks pages, not websites, and the URLs are the unique identifiers for each of them. If you move content to a new URL without changing a thing, congratulations. It’s a brand new page. And they’ll have to evaluate it from scratch before deciding how it should rank.
Keeping the URLs the same meant we could take bigger swings, earlier in the campaign. We radically rebuilt their HVAC answering services page by absorbing other top-performing content into it, such as taking an old blog post on “The Benefits of Hiring a HVAC Phone Answering Service” and making it a static part of the page. After all, it couldn’t be more relevant. We also took their extensive service offerings from another page and reworked a new copy that focused exclusively on what they offer for HVAC companies.
The results? Well, just Google “HVAC call center” or “HVAC answering service” and see for yourself. Now they compete with significantly larger companies. Since FOS provides more flexible, personalized, and comprehensive service, that often gives them the edge.
Fixing Old Websites vs. Building Old New Websites: Which is Better for SEO?
There still isn’t a cut-and-dry answer, unfortunately. But there are a few big factors that we take into consideration:
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- What is your old site built on? If it’s on a good platform like WordPress, using a theme that isn’t too messy, it often makes more sense to fix it up than rebuild it.
- What is the current SEO situation? If you’re getting some leads but not enough, it generally makes more sense to fix up the site. If you’re not getting any leads, that’s a sign that things are deeply broken.
- How much has your business changed since the site was built? If you’ve changed your service area or service offerings, those things can all complicate the choice. That’s especially true if your current website outright contradicts them, such as transitioning from plumbing & HVAC to strictly plumbing. Building a new website might be the way to go.
- How much has your branding changed since the site was built? Many web designers build your site around your logo and color scheme, expecting that you’re never going to change them (or that it won’t be their problem when you do!)
- Can you get all of the old logins? This one is a doozy. A lot of the benefits of fixing up an older site come from being able to access the mountain of data it’s accumulated over the years. But if you don’t have access to Google Search Console or Google Analytics, that benefit dries up fast.
Ultimately, it’s not a decision that you should make on your own.
If SEO is a priority, take the time to find a provider you can trust. Use your personal network, reach out to their other clients, and do your homework. Contact the provider and see how well they communicate: how quickly they respond to messages, how consistent they are, and whether they can speak like actual human beings. The choice to fix up an older website or build a new one takes a lot of ongoing coordination, so if their style rubs you wrong you should trust your gut and keep shopping.
Last but not least, if an SEO provider comes at you with a wall of tech jargon and automated reports, chances are good that they’re sales-focused. Their goal is to bully you into submission to sell you a new website, whether you need it or not. Fixing up older websites for new SEO campaigns is a tricky process that requires a lot of understanding and out-of-the-box thinking. Frankly, a lot of SEO providers just aren’t equipped for that.
