What Happened: A Cleaner Brand, Fewer Keywords

AMS has been working with businesses in Bangkok since 2007. Over those years, our services grew from graphic design into branding, websites and digital marketing. When we refreshed our brand, we wanted the website to reflect that broader role.

One decision felt obvious at the time. The word “design” appeared everywhere on the old site, and it made us sound like a studio that only produced visuals. So we reduced it. Headlines became shorter, service descriptions became more strategic, and the copy moved toward words like “brand”, “growth” and “experience”.

From a branding point of view, the change made sense. From a search point of view, it removed many of the exact phrases our clients use to find us: “logo design Bangkok”, “graphic design agency”, “website design Thailand”, “packaging design”. Google had built years of understanding around those pages and those words. When the words left, part of that understanding left with them.

No one on the team did anything wrong. Designers and copywriters improved the site by their own standards. What was missing was a step where every copy change was checked against what the page needed to rank for.

How We Noticed

Ranking drops after a redesign rarely arrive all at once. They build slowly, which is why they are easy to miss. In our case, the signals came from three places.

• Google Search Console. Impressions for design-related searches started to decline, while branded searches (people typing our name) stayed stable. That pattern usually means the site is still trusted, but no longer matched to certain topics.

• Keyword positions. Pages that had held steady positions for years began to move down a few places at a time. A drop from position 3 to position 9 looks small in a report, but it often means falling below the point where most people stop scrolling.

• The type of enquiries. Inbound requests through our contact form shifted. Fewer people arrived asking specifically for logo or website design, even though those remain core services for us.

None of these signals alone would have raised an alarm. Together, they pointed clearly to the content changes from the rebrand.

Why This Happens to So Many Websites

Search engines do not see a website the way a visitor does. A visitor notices layout, colour, photography and tone. Google mostly reads text, structure and links, then decides which searches each page deserves to appear for.

That means three types of change can affect rankings, even when the site looks better than before.

1. Copy changes. Every headline, subheading and paragraph tells Google what a page is about. Replace “Logo Design Agency in Bangkok” with “Building Brands That Last” and the page becomes more inspiring for people, but much less clear for search engines.

2. Structure changes. Redesigns often merge pages, remove old ones or rename menu items. A service that once had its own page may end up as one paragraph on a broader page. Each removed page can take its ranking history with it.

3. Technical changes. New URLs without redirects, missing page titles, images without descriptions, slower loading, or a different CMS can all reset signals that took years to build.

The underlying issue is that design teams and SEO teams often work in sequence rather than together. The site is designed and written first, then SEO is “added” before launch. By then, many of the decisions that matter most for search have already been made.

The Audit: How We Fixed It

We treated our own website the way we would treat a client’s. Instead of rewriting everything again, we ran a structured SEO and copy audit, page by page.

1. Built a keyword map. We listed the searches that matter for each service (branding, logo design, website design, SEO, social media, packaging) and assigned one main page to each. This shows instantly where two pages compete for the same term, and where a term has no page at all.

2. Compared old and new copy. For every key page, we compared the pre-rebrand text with the new text and marked which important phrases had disappeared. This step alone explained most of the drop.

3. Fixed the homepage and About page first. These pages carry the most authority on most sites. We brought back clear, descriptive wording in headlines and introductions, without returning to the old, repetitive style.

4. Balanced brand voice and search terms. A headline can carry the brand message while the subheading and first paragraph carry the search terms. Both audiences, people and search engines, are served on the same page.

5. Audited the Thai-language pages. We mapped every Thai page in a spreadsheet: its URL, its English equivalent, its main keyword, and whether the translation still matched the updated English copy. Several Thai pages were still based on old versions of the English text.

6. Planned hub pages. Some services had grown too broad for one page. We are building category hubs, starting with Branding, so each sub-service can have its own focused page linked from a clear parent page.

The important principle: we kept the new brand direction. The goal was never to undo the rebrand, only to make sure the new site said clearly, in plain words, what we do and where we do it.

If you want to see how we approach this for clients, our SEO services page explains the process from audit to reporting.

Common Redesign Mistakes We See in Bangkok

Our own experience made us more attentive to the same patterns in projects we review for other companies. These are the ones that come up most often.

• Changing URLs without redirects. A page moves from /services/logo-design to /branding, and the old address now shows an error. Every link and ranking pointing to the old URL is lost unless a 301 redirect sends it to the new page.

• Replacing descriptive copy with slogans. Short, emotional headlines look elegant in a design mockup. Without supporting text below them, Google has little to work with.

• Removing pages that “nobody visits”. Old blog articles and small service pages often bring steady search traffic and backlinks. Deleting them can hurt more than keeping them.

• Forgetting page titles and meta descriptions. New templates often ship with default titles such as “Home” or the company name only.

• Heavy visuals that slow the site down. Large videos and uncompressed images look impressive but affect loading speed, especially on mobile, which is how most people in Thailand browse.

• Changing platform without a migration plan. Moving from WordPress to Framer, Webflow or Shopify can be a good decision. It needs a clear list of every existing URL, its content and where it goes on the new site.

• Launching without a baseline. If you do not record rankings and traffic before launch, you cannot measure what changed afterward, or prove what caused it.
  
  

A Pre-Launch Checklist for Your Redesign

This is the checklist we now use on every website project, including our own. It works whether you build with Framer, WordPress or Shopify.

Before design starts

• Export your current rankings, top pages and traffic from Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

• List every existing URL and mark which pages bring traffic, backlinks or enquiries.

• Build a keyword map: one main search topic per page.

During design and copywriting

• Keep each page’s main keyword in the page title, the H1 or first subheading, and the opening paragraph.

• Let headlines carry the brand voice and supporting text carry the search terms.

• Plan where each old page goes: kept, merged, or redirected.

• Write clear page titles and meta descriptions for every page, not only the homepage.

Before launch

• Set up 301 redirects from every old URL to its new equivalent.

• Check loading speed on mobile, compress images, and limit autoplay video.

• Add alt text to images and check that headings follow a logical order.

• Submit the new sitemap to Google Search Console.

After launch

• Monitor rankings, impressions and 404 errors weekly for the first two to three months.

• Compare against your baseline and adjust copy on pages that lose ground.

• Keep publishing useful content, so Google has fresh reasons to revisit the site.

Our website design and development team builds these steps into the project plan from day one, so SEO is part of the design, not a final add-on.

Bilingual Websites: The Extra Risk in Thailand

Many businesses in Thailand run their website in Thai and English, sometimes with Chinese or French as well. A redesign doubles or triples the places where search visibility can slip.

• Translations fall out of sync. The English copy is updated during the redesign, but the Thai version still reflects the old text, or the other way round. Our own audit found exactly this.

• Thai keywords are not direct translations. People in Thailand often search differently from the literal translation of an English term, and sometimes mix Thai and English in the same query. Thai pages need their own keyword research.

• Language signals get lost. Each language version should have its own URL and the correct language tags (hreflang), so Google shows the Thai page to Thai searchers and the English page to everyone else.

• Thai pages get less attention at launch. Teams often test the English site in detail and assume the Thai version follows. A quick check of titles, links and redirects in every language avoids this.

A simple spreadsheet that maps each page across languages, with its keyword and last update date, is one of the most useful tools for keeping a multilingual site healthy.

Design and SEO Are One Decision

The main lesson from our rebrand is simple: design, copy and SEO should be decided together, at the same table, from the first workshop. A website that looks right but cannot be found does only half its job. A website that ranks but does not reflect the brand does not convert the visitors it attracts.

We did not get this perfectly right on our own site the first time. Sharing that openly is part of how we work: we test our methods on ourselves, learn from what goes wrong, and bring those lessons into client projects.

If you are planning a new website or a brand refresh, start with what your current site already does well in search, and protect it while you change everything else.