{"id":1238,"date":"2026-01-23T11:21:06","date_gmt":"2026-01-23T11:21:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kirkwood.im\/tmdev\/?p=1238"},"modified":"2026-01-23T11:21:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T11:21:07","slug":"top-things-website-owners-shouldnt-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kirkwood.im\/tmdev\/top-things-website-owners-shouldnt-do\/","title":{"rendered":"Things Website Owners Shouldn&#8217;t Do Without Speaking To Their SEO Consultant\u2026."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Number 1: Making structural changes to your website<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Had this happen to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A website owner decided to make a &#8220;few updates&#8221; to their product catalogue, including an overhaul of categories. This involved adding new categories (with new links) and deleting many of the existing ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Organic visitors and rankings mysteriously tanked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because in Google&#8217;s eyes some of highest organic landing pages no longer existed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What NOT to do without speaking to an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tallmarketing.co.uk\/\">SEO consultant<\/a> first:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u274c Renaming URLs because \u201cthis new one looks better\u201d<br>\u274c Deleting pages just because they&#8217;re old<br>\u274c Changing your navigation to &#8220;tidy it up&#8221;<br>\u274c Assuming Google will magically figure it all out<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A quick chat might just save your rankings and your SEOs sanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-9-16 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Number 1: Making structural changes to your website\" width=\"422\" height=\"750\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/F1_yEhp-T34?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Number 2: Deleting blogs, products or pages<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Before you start hitting delete on those old blogs, pages or discontinued products\u2026 pause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>No problem if you&#8217;re want to clear up your website, but if you don\u2019t seek advice or speak to your <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tallmarketing.co.uk\/seo\/\">SEO<\/a> first, you could end up removing much more than just outdated content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That blog post you don&#8217;t want anymore from 2019? It might be quietly bringing in steady visitors to your website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That old product page? It could have backlinks pointing to it that help boost the organic visibility of the whole website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That service you no longer offer? Maybe it\u2019s ranking and generating leads you can offer different services to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SEO often isn\u2019t about what you can see, it\u2019s about what\u2019s happening in the background.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Instead of deleting pages, your SEO might recommend:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2b50 Redirecting the page URL into another relevant page<br>\u2b50 Updating or repurposing the content<br>\u2b50 Keeping it live for simply for traffic and link equity<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cleaning up your website can be a positive thing to do, but don&#8217;t do it simply based on opinions, look at the data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-9-16 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Number 2: Deleting blogs, products or pages\" width=\"422\" height=\"750\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/TzoGjQXCeJI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Number 3: Launching a new website or some big new updates<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You&#8217;ll be surprised how often this happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Redesigns are exciting. Often they come with a branding refresh, new page layouts and more simple website structures. However, if you&#8217;re not including your SEO the updates could easily do far more harm than good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Classic scenarios are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\ud83d\udea8The new update includes widespread changes to URL and website structure<br>\ud83d\udea8New updates removes tracking codes and conversion events<br>\ud83d\udea8Updates pushed live with zero thought to redirects or current traffic driving ranking positions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then the message arrives: &#8220;Hi, why has our visitor numbers dropped off a cliff?&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As an SEO we&#8217;re far more effective being part of the plans rather than having to fix problems after they happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Website updates should be a step forward, not a complete reset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Leave your SEO in the loop from the start and you\u2019ll avoid a ton of unnecessary headaches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-9-16 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Number 3 - Launching a new website or some big new updates\" width=\"422\" height=\"750\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/QFVib8gQ9Ds?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Number 4: Doing your own keyword targeting<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I know choosing your own keywords sounds simple. Afterall you know your business and customers better than anyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The problems start when people pick search terms they would use, not what target customers are actually using when products or services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Keyword research isn&#8217;t guesswork, there&#8217;s loads of data available around search volume and competition. The target keywords of any SEO campaign need to be a happy medium between the search phrases people are actually using, what your website can realistically rank for and what will convert into new enquiries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;ve seen it before:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u274c Choosing keywords that sound nice but have zero search volume<br>\u274c Broad keywords that will attract the wrong audience<br>\u274c Local businesses trying to rank for national keywords<br>\u274c Benchmarking against 10 variations of the same keyword &#8211; Google will see very little difference<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As an SEO we don&#8217;t pick target keywords at random. We&#8217;re doing the research to find the search phrases that are actually being used by your target audience to attract website visitors that matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Number 5: Buying links in large volume off Fiverr<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Let&#8217;s have a little chat about links\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I get it. Buying 1000 high DA backlinks for \u00a34.99 off Fiverr looks tempting. The seller has created a good profile, they have good ratings and they assure you they can rapidly make your website rank number 1 for competitive keywords.&nbsp; What could go wrong?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well\u2026 a fair bit to be honest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Buying links at all isn&#8217;t a great idea, but buying cheap links in high volume is highly likely to do your SEO more harm than good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What actually happens when you buy links in packages like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\ud83d\udea8Your links get placed on websites that are part of massive networks that thousands of people have bought links off<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\ud83d\udea8These website will likely receive next to no visitors themselves and contain a huge amount of poorly written content and point links at poor quality websites<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\ud83d\udea8There&#8217;s a good chance the websites also contain large amounts of completely irrelevant content<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\ud83d\udea8Your own backlink profile goes supersonic overnight which looks particularly unnatural<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\ud83d\udea8Chances are Google has long since started to ignore all links off these websites and potentially penalise those who are still acquiring links from them<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\ud83d\udea8Continuing this tactic could lead onto a manual penalty where Google makes of point of lowering or even removing your ranking positions<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Google has spent years ensuring they pass zero link authority from these networks. Their systems can quickly identify familiar link patterns. Some networks that potentially have passed authority in the past can get shut down, along with all the links you paid for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Effective ink building is about relevance, quality and long term growth. Not buying a load of links on websites hosted across the world and hoping Google won&#8217;t notice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Number 6: Judging the success of SEO by the results on an automated website &#8220;audit&#8221; tool<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Everyone has used SEO audit tools to &#8220;score&#8221; their website. There are even some agencies out there that will use them to dictate an SEO strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There&#8217;s no doubt they are useful to pick up technical issues that can be resolved but no one should be using the scores they produce as a key metric of SEO success or failure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\ud83d\udea8They flag issues as &#8220;critical&#8221; or &#8220;important&#8221; that really aren&#8217;t<br>\ud83d\udea8These tools don&#8217;t understand priorities<br>\ud83d\udea8They love to use dramatic language<br>\ud83d\udea8They judge websites based on a technical checklist<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The problem is that Google doesn&#8217;t judge a website based on your tool&#8217;s checklist. Google does care about having a technically sound website, but they do that alongside analysing the whole user experience, the content you&#8217;re producing and the authority you&#8217;re building through links and social engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Automated tools cannot read your website like a human. I could show you a host of websites that rank well for competitive keywords that produce a relatively poor score in your SEO audit tool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Number 7: Publishing content you&#8217;ve &#8220;written&#8221; by predominately copy and pasting from your chosen AI tool<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>The age of AI has brought with it the power for website owners to quickly produce infinite amounts of content. Apparently gone are the days when you should pay someone to write unique, relevant and high quality wording for your websites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Look, AI tools are fantastic. They are great at creating ideas and speeding the process up. However, its now so easy to tell if a blog, product description or intro text is predominately AI generated\u2026 In today&#8217;s digital world?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Use AI as a kind of assistant to guide you if you need but all the content your publish needs to be written by a human. Google loves content that demonstrates authority, and what better way to do that than get a writer knowledgeable in your field or even write it yourself. You know your business, products or services better than anyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So what&#8217;s the negative impact on SEO of publishing AI generated content?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u274c The content will likely be similar to any other person who&#8217;s used a similar prompt<br>\u274c AI won&#8217;t get your tone of voice. It&#8217;ll use generic language that doesn&#8217;t reflect you or your brand<br>\u274c It doesn&#8217;t show your real world experience or industry authority<br>\u274c The content could be keyword stuffed leading to over optimisation<br>\u274c You&#8217;ll produce large volumes of content that don&#8217;t mean a great deal<br>\u274c The pages will produce poor user engagement rates and result in people leaving your website<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>All the content your publishing should be worth reading to your target customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Number 8: Migrating your website to a new hosting provider<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>There are many reasons why as a website owner you might choose to move your hosting provider, and for many the process shouldn&#8217;t be too complicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You may choose to switch hosting because of a poor experience, server performance, cost or features you need. But you should plan any major steps like this as it can have big impacts on your SEO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Not so long back I was working on a website who&#8217;s rankings suddenly started going backwards. I couldn&#8217;t understand why until a spoke to the client who said: &#8220;I&#8217;ve not done anything to the website recently other than move to a new hosting server&#8221;\u2026 alarms bells started going off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So what can happen with unplanned server moves?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now website hosting can get technical so bare with me\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\ud83d\udea8There can be delays in the DNS propagation. If the DNS isn&#8217;t managed properly it can result in the website being down for a period and people (including search engine bots) seeing varying versions of the website. i.e. bouncing between the servers leading to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tallmarketing.co.uk\/power-of-technical-seo\/\">inconsistent crawling<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\ud83d\udea8Broken SSL or even no SSL certificate. Some servers charge extra for SSL certificates or take a great deal of time to implement one. This leads to websites being marked as &#8220;unsecure&#8221; by many browsers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\ud83d\udea8Redirect rules missing. It&#8217;s amazing how often this happens with server moves. It can be avoided by your SEO taking back ups and immediately checking everything is in place following a move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\ud83d\udea8Physical server location shifts. Moving from a UK based server to a random (probably cheaper) data centre overseas can result in slower speeds and affect geotargeting signals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\ud83d\udea8Slower load speeds. Google likes to rank websites that load fast and provide good user experiences, and a key part of page speed can be the hosting environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Moving hosting provider doesn&#8217;t need to be a bad move. But tell everyone involved in your website management first, and choose a new provider that provides real technical benefits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Number 9: Adding an removing plugins that have &#8220;no impact on SEO&#8221;<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Most local businesses I come across are operating a WordPress website, and for good reason (I do too!).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With WordPress its relatively straight forward to add or remove features or functionality using its vast library of plugins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, unless you have a crystal clear understanding of what you&#8217;re doing, you shouldn&#8217;t be adding or removing plugins. Every plugin has the potential to break something unrelated or slow something down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s some guidelines on plugins:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u274c The truth is that most plugins will add load to your website and slow it down<br>\u274c Some plugins will clash. This leads to broken navigation bars, confusing page layouts and general messy websites &#8211; or even bring websites down<br>\u274c Unmanaged plugins are a security risk. Hackers love to find backdoors into websites through outdated plugins<br>\u274c Removing plugins could remove important functionality or significantly impact the general design<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A small plugin change can have a surprisingly big impact on how your website behaves or looks. I&#8217;m happy to discus plugin options with everyone I work with, website cleanups following random plugin additions are not fun at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Number 1: Making structural changes to your website Why? Had this happen to me. A website owner decided to make a &#8220;few updates&#8221; to their product catalogue, including an overhaul of categories. This involved adding new categories (with new links) and deleting many of the existing ones. Organic visitors and rankings mysteriously tanked. Why? Because [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-insights"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirkwood.im\/tmdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirkwood.im\/tmdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirkwood.im\/tmdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirkwood.im\/tmdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirkwood.im\/tmdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1238"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kirkwood.im\/tmdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1240,"href":"https:\/\/kirkwood.im\/tmdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238\/revisions\/1240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirkwood.im\/tmdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirkwood.im\/tmdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirkwood.im\/tmdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}