How to use 301 redirects as a small business with a website
Ok, so creating 301 redirects for your website as a small business can sound like a “techy” subject, but I promise I’m here to demystify the tech jargon and teach you in your average Joe language.
I honestly feel this is a practise every small business owner that maintains a website needs to know.
Why? Creating 301 redirects for your website provides great user experience and preserves your positive search engine ranking (SEO) on your website.
IN A NUTSHELL
What are 301 Redirects?
“Permanently rerouting incoming traffic to a new location.”
Every page on your website has a unique URL, right? Simple stuff.
Imagine you have changed the domain completely for your website… or maybe replaced an old page with a new page and then created a new URL for that page.
For example you are a photographer that now does branding photography and have changed your about page URL from /about-photography to /about-branding-photography.
Great! We now have an improved page URL with specific key words. Your ideal client is searching on Google for a branding photographer and will hopefully find your website.
But say you have shared your old URL on social media, or say a repeat user has learnt your old URL off by heart (great sign!) and types in directly into their browser. Where does that now-incorrect URL take them?
You will need to carry out 301 redirects when you make any changes to the URL structure of your website.
If you haven’t redirected the old URL to the new one, any search engine will throw up a 404 error code.
Uh oh.
Where does your user go now? They would probably close the browser and look for another website—I know I would.
This is, of course, a very bad user experience and will not go down well with search engines. You could even be looking at a negative prang in your overall organic search rating (SEO), which can absolutely be avoided.
Redirecting URL’s is actually a very simple process.
With one line of instruction added to your website you can tell your server to re-route all traffic that clicks on your old URL, seamlessly to your new URL.
Amazing!
You now know that all referral links, bookmarked pages, and old business card domains will be going to the correct place.
So how can I carry out a 301 redirect?
Firstly, let’s look at how your website is built. Was it custom coded from scratch by a web developer? Was it built using a web builder like Squarespace?
Either way I’ll walk through these 2 examples.
Not sure how your small business website was built? Feel free to give us a shout and I will have a look at your websites code and let you know. :)
Redirecting URLs on a custom coded website.
If you are adding 301 redirects to a website that has been custom coded, you would need to follow some pretty tech savvy steps before carrying this out correctly.
You would need to get access to what is called a “.htaccess file” (a plain text file on Apache servers) by logging into your server and adding to the file with some lines of code.
A wee warning here.. if you make mistakes or change your .htaccess file, you may turn around and find you’ve fluffled up your site and create problems for your users. This isn’t a job for the enthusiast; I recommend hiring a professional web developer to do this for you.
Redirecting URLs on Squarespace.
Squarespace makes it super easy (sticking to their usual theme of being very user-friendly), and you can add your redirects straight from your account, so no need to install plugins or play around with the DNA of your website.
STEP ONE
Take note of the old and new URL.
Navigate to your left toolbar and make sure you are 'Home’.
Click on Settings —> Advanced —> URL Mappings
Follow the clear instructions provided.
For example:
<original url> -> <new url> <redirect type>
/about-photography -> /about-branding-photography 301
Note how the new URL is more key word specific? Definitely do this yourself. But be careful… search engines like Google don’t like URLs that are too long, so don’t get too excited!
Conclusion
301 redirects are a process of telling your server to permanently re-route traffic to a new location.
Implementing redirects preserves your SEO ranking for the old pages you’ve moved to a new URL.
Once redirected, you’ve improved the user experience for your business website and ensured you won’t lose traffic when you change the URL structure of your website.
Google will eventually do this process for you once they index your new website. Nevertheless, redirecting URLs yourself is best practice and ensures you maintain a professional website at all times.
