What should be planned before the design starts?
Four things. Which services and places you want to be found for, in the words customers use rather than your own. Which of those deserve a page of their own. What proof each page needs to carry to be taken seriously. And which existing pages already rank, so nothing is thrown away by accident.
That research usually changes the site map, and a site map that changes after design is expensive.
What goes wrong when SEO is left until after launch?
The two we see most are lost rankings and orphaned services. Rankings are lost when old page addresses change and nothing redirects them, so years of links and history point at nothing. Services are orphaned when a redesign folds six pages into one tidy services page, which reads well and ranks for none of them. Both are avoidable, and both happen constantly on Leeds business sites that were redesigned for looks.
Does a new website affect Google rankings?
It can, in either direction. A redesign that keeps the page addresses, improves the content and fixes the technical problems usually gains. A redesign that changes every address without redirects, drops pages and slows the site down usually loses, and the drop shows up a few weeks after launch, when it is hardest to reverse. The difference is planning, which is why we map the old site against the new one before a single page is built.
How does Halizona handle the search side of a redesign?
We start with the searches. Keyword and competitor research decides the pages, the pages decide the structure, and the structure decides the design. Every page that exists today is mapped to where it goes next, redirects are written before launch, and the technical foundations are checked on the live site the day it goes up. Bond Brickwork has ranked at the top for the commercial brickwork searches that matter for years because the site was built around them from the start.
If you want the search work to continue after launch, we can manage that too.
What about AI search?
The same planning covers it. Google’s AI answers, ChatGPT and the rest need to understand who you are, what you do, where you work and what evidence backs it, and they read the same clearly structured pages a person does. A site planned around real searches, with named services, locations and projects, gives them what they need. A site planned around a mood board does not.
