Def: “A crippling fear of updating your website home page for fear of
adversely affecting your Google search ranking & traffic”.
Paranoid about making changes to your home page?
You built your website a couple of years back, you’ve spent time (possibly money) getting your Seach Engine Optimisation right, and you’re proud of your Google traffic and page rank. You know that the copy on your website is a key factor in your search engine ranking but you desperately want to give it an update or refresh… but you don’t dare.
Are you suffering from Google Fear!?
I’ve been there myself. I had a website selling a cat product which ranked #1 in Google for the product name, and was the single biggest driver behind product sales. But the site looked awful, the copy was dreadful, and it was in need of an overhaul. Some might say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but I was convinced that with a better site design and more compelling message, I was likely to generate more sales from the traffic I was getting.
So I took the plunge about 4 months ago and completely re-built the website from scratch, including switching to Wordpress and re-writing all the copy (obviously doing so with my main keywords in mind still!). The result: still number 1 for the search term, plus with a more flexible publishing system I’m now starting to rank highly for other, peripheral search terms too.
Now I’m not suggesting you should be as agressive as I was in changing the website, but instead making the point that there’s more to SEO than just your website copy. In my case, I have a product website with an excellent domain name that’s been running for 6 years plus: clearly in this instance Google is giving greater weight to these factors than to the copy that happens to be on my website.
Other on- and off-page factors will also influence your search ranking, such as inbound links, page naming conventions, page titles, meta descriptions, internal linking structure etc etc. So if you decide to tinker with the copy on your homepage, unless you do something pretty stupid it’s unlikely that you’re going to see a major adverse impact on your Google ranking.
What’s more, Google is reputed to give weight to recency and frequency, so you may even find some search traffic benefit in giving that home page an occasional refresh. And the best bit… if you do see a downturn in your Google traffic… you can always change it back!
by
Are you suffering from Google Fear?
Def: “A crippling fear of updating your website home page for fear of
adversely affecting your Google search ranking & traffic”.
Paranoid about making changes to your home page?
You built your website a couple of years back, you’ve spent time (possibly money) getting your Seach Engine Optimisation right, and you’re proud of your Google traffic and page rank. You know that the copy on your website is a key factor in your search engine ranking but you desperately want to give it an update or refresh… but you don’t dare.
Are you suffering from Google Fear!?
I’ve been there myself. I had a website selling a cat product which ranked #1 in Google for the product name, and was the single biggest driver behind product sales. But the site looked awful, the copy was dreadful, and it was in need of an overhaul. Some might say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but I was convinced that with a better site design and more compelling message, I was likely to generate more sales from the traffic I was getting.
So I took the plunge about 4 months ago and completely re-built the website from scratch, including switching to Wordpress and re-writing all the copy (obviously doing so with my main keywords in mind still!). The result: still number 1 for the search term, plus with a more flexible publishing system I’m now starting to rank highly for other, peripheral search terms too.
Now I’m not suggesting you should be as agressive as I was in changing the website, but instead making the point that there’s more to SEO than just your website copy. In my case, I have a product website with an excellent domain name that’s been running for 6 years plus: clearly in this instance Google is giving greater weight to these factors than to the copy that happens to be on my website.
Other on- and off-page factors will also influence your search ranking, such as inbound links, page naming conventions, page titles, meta descriptions, internal linking structure etc etc. So if you decide to tinker with the copy on your homepage, unless you do something pretty stupid it’s unlikely that you’re going to see a major adverse impact on your Google ranking.
What’s more, Google is reputed to give weight to recency and frequency, so you may even find some search traffic benefit in giving that home page an occasional refresh. And the best bit… if you do see a downturn in your Google traffic… you can always change it back!
Image under CC Attribution License courtesy of Kwerfeldein on Flickr.
Go on... click it... you know you want to!
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