When you make a change to any website, there are bound to be changes to how search engines will see your website. This can have an impact on your website’s SEO. However, that doesn’t mean that it is necessarily a bad thing. Some changes might improve your website’s SEO and therefore bring you in more traffic. Or the change could make your site rank lower on search results.
There are also times when you might rank higher for some terms and lower for other terms. This might be okay if you’re trying to focus on certain keywords where you have higher rankings now. But in some cases, this can drop your performance.
Why Does This Matter?
About 70% of your website traffic should be generated by organic search. If you don’t have that level of traffic on your website from Google and other search engines, then you’re missing out on potential sales. The level of traffic from these sites will also depend greatly on your position on Google. Those brands that can appear within the first 2-3 results will get about 90% of the traffic from search engines. Those that appear 10th in the search results, can sometimes expect to have 1% of the search traffic.
Therefore, if a keyword has 1,000 search queries a day, then you can get up to 900 visits a day from searchers if you’re in the top three. However, if you’re at the bottom of the first page, then you might only get about 90 visits per day.
The difference to your bottom line can be massive. Those at the top of the search engine results can earn ten times the revenue as those at the bottom of the page.
What Impacts Ranking
Many factors can impact the success of your SEO campaigns. One of them is speed. If a template speeds up your website loading times, then you are likely to see an increase in your website’s ranking on Google. You can test your website speed with several free online tools, including Google’s own Page Insights Tool.
Another factor is the number and frequency of keywords on your website. If you’ve lost some content sections or types of content on your website, this can impact your ranking. Likewise, if you’ve spent more time on your website when you made the template change, you likely made some good keyword decisions.
Finally, internal linking might be a problem. If pages have been lost or changed during the template switch, then you might find that your website suffers as there are broken links across your site. This is something that Google doesn’t like and will negatively impact you.
Final Word: Will Switching Squarespace Templates Affect My Site’s SEO?
Anything that you do on your website can impact your success on search engines. Changing an image, adding in new content or even removing content from your website change your rank and allow more traffic to your site. Changing your Squarespace template is just the same, but the process is more complex and sometimes you can improve your SEO in some areas and weaken it in other areas. So always be sure to follow up on any changes with an analysis of your website’s SEO performance.
