My chiropractor has a website through one of those web companies that cranks out thousands of websites in one niche. It’s an affordable option for my chiropractor, who is a 1-man practice. Unfortunately, you get what you pay for with services like this, and when he casually mentioned that the web company just redesigned his website overnight, I knew I had to do damage control.

I brought up the home page and was happy to see a more modern look to his website, nice sliders, better calls to action, an improved navigation menu, etc.  Whew! It looks good!

Unfortunately, my relief was short-lived. After clicking around the site, I noticed that the URL extensions no longer included .html. I hopped over to Google and searched for the website, which returned results of the old URLs. I held my breath as I clicked on one, hoping I would be directed to the new redesigned website….

The web company neglected to do 301 redirects. (Not to mention – have you ever seen a more generic 404 page?) I wrote a draft of an email for the chiropractor to send to customer support. I even included an example URL to make my request crystal clear. The web company replied promptly that the issue had been fixed. Great! Let me check it out to confirm…

They ONLY fixed the one example URL that I sent over.

Ugh. Do I have to do everything myself?

I had done some light SEO for the chiropractor awhile back, so I pulled up my old spreadsheet of all of the website URLs and instructed the web company to 301 redirect all of the old URLs to the new URLs of each individual page.

Luckily all of this was remedied before Google had a chance to index the new website, so the chiropractor didn’t lose any search engine visibility.  And actually, with his new design, the site was now mobile friendly and he’s actually seen a bump in organic activity. Coupled with my PPC campaign, my chiropractor is a VERY happy business owner.