Unveiling the Secrets: What No One Tells You About Website Revamps – Save Your Leads Now!

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to feed Feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey there. Welcome back to feed, you'd band. I'm Tom Hazard, your host and today I'm gonna talk about unveiling the secrets what no one tells you about website revamps. And I have to say I'm very passionate about this. I kind of geek out on it. I'm gonna give you a little fair warning, although I'm gonna try not to get terribly technical. And in the wee much you consider this a podcaster public service announcement. And really not only for podcasters. Anybody listening to this podcast or watching this video who has a website and is considering revamping it or has revamped their website recently, you want to listen to this because you probably don't know if you've already revamped your site. There's some things that you may not even know to check on and make sure that we're done properly that could be killing your discoverability, really tanking your website analytics. And if you're considering redoing your website, revamping your website sometime soon, you need to know about some of these things to ask the right questions of whoever is working on your website.

Now this is kind of like one of those old TV shows where we change the names to protect the innocent and type of thing. I'm going to be a little bit anonymous and not going to out anyone here. But I do have a couple of cautionary tales, a couple of recent examples that really motivated me and made me realize I had to share this information with all of our podcast listeners, our podcast customers. Because I've just seen so many people make some big mistakes, some unforced errors they didn't need to make had they known to ask the right questions of their resource. So let me take example a right off the bat, existing podcasters been a done for you poditize customer for probably four years, I think. And in fact when it came to their podcast website, Podties created it for them and we do that for about 5% of our customers who need that. Now. This is not about us building a website. Their first podcast website had grown over years, gained a lot of keyword Rankings, a lot of organic traffic. And they had about, gosh, they had on this particular show something in the neighborhood of 80 or 83 podcast blogs, comprehensive ones on their website. And their website had a lot of backlinks, had a lot of keyword rankings, and was getting organic traffic from Google search. Well, this company just decided on their own, hey, we need to update our branding for our business and our podcast. They didn't even tell us they were doing it. They figured, hey, we need some professional branding expert to do this. And they redo their show brand. And this company, they hired a website development company that that's all they do, nothing to do with podcasting, to build them a brand new website along with their new brand for their business and what became a revamp of the brand for the show. And then they told us about it when it was new and hey, we need you to post our new blogs for new episodes to this new website. Okay, fine. Well, this web developer told them, oh yeah, they created a new website and that they would transfer all of their blogs from the old website to the new website. Well, after the job was done, after they paid that other web developer and they have us start doing their new episodes on the new website, we go into their website, as we do with every done for you podcast customer, to post new blogs. We're in their website and there were only four of their 80 blogs in there and even those four were not properly copied over configured for SEO. And I'm going to talk about a couple of details again without getting into the weeds of every nitty gritty technical detailer. But just an example so you can understand. What's so critical about this is that this company sold them on doing it all for them and didn't do it all for them, essentially did not convert all of their blogs from one website to the other. And These were both WordPress websites, completely compatible. You can export from one and import into the other. So they ended up seeking our support to do that and we did it. But here is the scary part is not just to make sure when you engage with someone to build you a new website, make sure that you're very clear with them and they're clear and understand and confirm in writing that they are going to transfer all the content from the old site to the new site, very critical. But also that they're going to maintain all of the, what we call permalinks. Now you might say, what's a permalink? Well, it's a URL you click into any page of a Website or any blog of a website, there's this long string, yourwebsite.com and then this long, usually code name dashes in it, all sorts of things that represents a page on the website. That link, that URL is the permalink and you don't ever want it to change. This is the real fundamental thing because Google gets to know your website over months and years, it has indexed the website, meaning it has a map of the whole site. It knows all the pages there. It's crawled through every page and read all the words and associated those words with search results in their search bar. And if you change that URL of those pages, any of those pages, it breaks all that information and Google has to start all over again. So what happened with this podcast customer when all their blogs were not transferred over and the ones that were didn't have the same URL to Google? This is a new website and it's a new blog and it doesn't trust it yet. And this podcaster lost a huge amount of value equity that had been built in their website, in their domain name, within Google, and they ended up coming to us. And we have to do some triage and pick up the pieces and restore all those blogs. But those permalinks are critical. So this customer lost an awful lot of Google traffic. Google ranking, it did build back up because you can fix these things. It just takes time and it doesn't happen immediately. So if you go too far in making changes to your website and you're rebuilding everything from scratch, it's important to know that Google understands revamping websites, creating a new website within a 30 day period, changing from one site to another, you won't lose everything. It's not like every time you revamp a website, you're gonna start from zero. No, in fact, hopefully you don't lose anything. But you've gotta maintain all those pages and all those links, especially for the blogs. Now, another thing that happens when you create a new website, if you've changed, even if all the content's there, all the pages are there, and you've changed those permalinks, you've changed the identity of those pages out on the Internet, you also might have a lot of backlinks that get broken. What are backlinks? Well, backlinks are a link from someone else's website to a page on your website. So you can imagine if you're a podcaster, you've been creating and publishing podcasts for years with guests that have their own websites, and they then Might have a media page, a press page, an about page where they've got information about, hey, I was on this person's podcast and here's a link to it from my website to a page on their website. You revamp your website and that link changes. Now you've got a broken link. When somebody clicks it on that guest website, it brings up a 404 error, doesn't go anywhere if that link was not maintained.

Now two ways you can accomplish this. You don't want to have to rely on communicating with the guest and say here's a new link. Would you update it on your website? I think it has a very low percentage of success, of probability of actually happening. What's better is you know what the link was to the page on your website, because it was a page on your website, I'm sure have that information on or had that information. If for some reason you cannot maintain all of the permalinks, all the original URLs for those pages on your website, which is by the way, the number one recommendation, as I said before, maintain all those links. Just because you revamp a website or you build a whole new one does not mean any of those links need to change. That they can all be the same. But let's say there's a good reason why they needed to change. Well then you have to make sure your web developer, if they're going to do that, creates a complete list of what are called 301 redirects. This would be in your website. It says, hey, anybody who comes into my website to this link, that's the old one, instead go to this link so they get to the resulting same page. That's okay too because Google will see that and eventually update their indexing and change what page that search results go to. So a proper 3 on redirects will also work in that situation. You need to just make sure you maintain this. Otherwise I mean you're just going to lose so much value, so much equity. Your website will become a ghost on the Internet. And you don't want that. All of us that are podcasting, that have our podcast pages on our website and have a blog for every episode, tremendous value in that. And you've heard us say this on many episodes of Feed, you'd brand there was just huge, huge value. Any of you listening to this as a test, go to Google right now and type in worst podcast websites. And I'm sure even if you're listening to this a year after I've recorded and published this episode, it's probably going to be the same because it's been about five years since that episode of Feed you'd brand published, which is about the best and worst podcast websites. And that blog still comes up on the first page of Google search five years later for that search term. That's the kind of value I'm talking about. We get people coming to our website, learning about our company who didn't know us, learning about our podcast who didn't know about it and weren't even looking for a podcast, but they were searching on Google for something about websites, and that blog post comes up. That's the kind of value I'm talking about. You can lose in an instant when you revamp your website or rebuild your website. And you either hire someone to do it who doesn't know what they're doing or doesn't care. All they wanted was to get your money and build you a new website without having to worry about all those technical details of making sure all of those permalinks are maintained going forward or properly redirected, as I said, is another, I would say, second best option. You can hurt yourself tremendously. So now the third thing I want to talk about. In this episode, we talked about revamping your website and not maintaining permalinks. You want them to do the same. If you can't do it, you gotta do redirects. Okay. Well, I encountered another situation very recently. It's another cautionary tale. This podcaster has been doing a great job for three years at least since they started their show. And they just made an internal decision with their web developer that they wanted to change a part of the structure of their website. And their website had the structure of their domain name forward slash, podcasts, plural is where their podcast page was. And then all the blogs were underneath that. And they wanted to change it to podcast singular. And they also, even though the best permalink for SEO is a long string of text where the title of the episode is a part of that permalink, that is NSEO best practice, that they wanted to change it and make it so that people could just go to their website name forward slash, podcast forward slash, the guest name, first name, last name, as one word and make it easier for them to talk about episodes. And they started to change permalinks, do all this stuff, and it created a huge hassle. And the reason I'm sharing this recent experience with you is there was a good way to handle that. Now you want to make the change in the structure of the Website from podcasts to. You could do that. You need to put in a redirect that is going to catch everything that was under what that old name was to the new one. And you can do that as a global redirect. What they call a wild card type of a redirect. Just, hey, everything that went here instead go there. Basic thing, but when it comes to that permalink of doing the guest name, a guest name is a really bad permalink to have for your episode because. Well, for a number of reasons. One is, well, do they have a funny spelling of the name? Are people gonna understand that? But it's also short. It doesn't have anything to do with the title of the episode. Rarely do we title an episode as a podcaster, only the guest name. There's some longer title that's better for SEO. It's more about what's in it for the listener. What are they gonna get when they listen to this episode than they're searching on the guest name. Now, the guest name can be a part of the title. It can also be a part of the permalink if you want it to be. But it shouldn't be the only part of it. And so we came up with a strategy to help this customer out where. Oh, it's just easier for you, the host, as you're talking about an episode, as you're emailing someone about an episode, as you're maybe speaking from the stage, as this customer did at an event and said, hey, you need to listen to this episode, go to my website.com guest name. They wanted to be able to say that, well, that's wonderful. You can do that. You can create a 301 redirect for anything you want. You can make up anything. You can make it my website.com forward/ Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3, if that's easy for you. Or the guest name as one word or the guest name first name dash last name, whatever convention you want, you can do that. But you create a short URL easier for people to remember that will forward redirect, forward people to the existing long permalink, the existing URL that's better for SEO, that has really what the title of that blog article episode is. And so you can accomplish all these things and make it easy for you as a host to remember and say, oh, you're interested in this, Go listen to that episode and you can text them a link and it's easy for you to remember. You know, remember that whole long crazy string. Wonderful. Just do it. In the right way and don't trip on an unintended landmine that's gonna blow up your website, SEO your rankings and your traffic. So that's again the overall point that I wanna share with you today and try to save you some headache. Unlike these other two recent potatoes customers add where they were trying to improve their businesses, they were trying to improve their websites for good reasons. And like I said at the beginning, if you want to update or revamp your website, wonderful, please do. I'm all in support of that and anybody really should be who supports you, but you've got to make sure you know what you're getting into, that you're doing it the right way, that the resource that you hire, if you're not doing it yourself, knows what they're doing and ask the right questions. Hey, you're going to build this website or you're going to revamp my website? Are all the permalinks going to be the same as they are for every page and every blog? Make sure every blog, make sure the answer to that is yes, and that if they don't do it at the end of the day, they're responsible for doing it. So you don't have to hire someone else to pick up the pieces as a couple of our customers did.

And if there's a good reason why they're not going to maintain all those permalinks, then are they going to, as a part of their service, take the time to create all those proper redirects, especially so all those backlinks that have been built up from other websites are the same. So people don't click link from someone else's website and end up with a 404 page, sorry, file not found on your website. No one wants that. People are gonna say, oh great, bad link, forget it. Next onto the next thing. Just gotta make sure you think about these things and probably more. Although today all I'm talking about is these few key things is maintaining all the content. Remember there were three things, maintaining all the blogs from the start. Second thing is maintaining the permalinks. Third thing is if that maintaining the backlinks. And for both of those permalinks and backlinks, if they can't be completely maintained, you gotta have them redirected. All right, so that's my sort of cautionary tale Podcaster public service announcement for today. I hope you find it useful. I know this is a podcast show, that's true. But as if you've listened to this show for many episodes at all you know that a key part of your platform as a podcaster is your website. And if you don't have one, then I highly recommend you get one. And I highly recommend you get one on WordPress if you are have the opportunity to choose that platform. Only because in our experience it's the most in alignment with Google, easiest to get ranked on and get traffic coming to your website. And one other thing I will share is that Poditize does offer a website maintenance subscription to our customers as an option. You have to be a podcaster. So if you're listening to this podcast and you're not yet a podcaster, we don't just do that for anybody off the street. You have to be a podcaster. And we only provide website maintenance on WordPress websites because it's a very good system. We know what we're doing and we do an excellent job of it. But you can get anything fixed on your website with a good website maintenance subscription. You can reach out to us@politize.com if you are interested in that or have any questions about it. Not meant to be a shameless plug, but I'm just wanting to let you know there are resources to help you if you need it. If you don't have a good resource, you can get one. But regardless of how you do it, please just make sure you take care not to really kill all this great equity and value that you are building in your website through your podcast. All right, thanks so much everyone. Hope you find value in that. Tracy and I will be back next time together with another great episode. Until then, I'm signing off. This is Tom on feed.

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