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This eight-step site redesign SEO strategy is suitable for everyone, regardless of whether you are a novice or a veteran who wants to ensure you have done everything correctly.
SEO is an Excellent Option for a Redesign
What is SEO? Why is it so crucial during website redesigns? You have nothing to lose. Let's assume your site is doing well. Your site ranks well, your organic traffic is substantial, and your revenue grows. Are you willing to reverse all the hard work? You can still improve the performance of a website by being strategic.
As you can see, traffic steadily rose (from the red circle), even during the reindexing phase. You will only lose traffic or rankings if you do your redesign correctly. You will gain them.
Here are some steps to help you understand your site and the test site being built. This is crucial when you want to change your website. I'll show you how to ensure that the web agency maintains the SEO work done on your site.
SEO is crucial for Website Redesigns
Profit is the ultimate goal. A website redesign is a marketing investment that increases your revenue through increased rankings and traffic.
You may be redesigning your website to appeal to your target audience. A more appealing website can generate more revenue through branding, business lead generation, and a higher return on investment.
Your website serves two primary functions:
- Attracting your target audience.
- Engaging and converting your target audience after they visit your website.
The first function of your website needs to be considered when redesigning it. This is a quick way for your digital marketing investment to be wasted. This could reduce your company's profits and significantly increase the time it takes to pay back for your website redesign.
How to Redesign a Website Without Losing SEO
You can strengthen the website's primary functions by redesigning it without affecting SEO value. Your website will attract more customers and convert them into paying customers:
- Take inventory of your pages.
- Use a Test Site.
- Check out Your Redesigned Website.
- Install 301 redirects.
- Redesigned Site Activated.
- Verify Robots Information.
- Install the Search Console.
- Monitoring SEO Performance Changes.
This checklist will assist you in navigating the site redesign process without affecting your rankings with major search engines.
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Take Inventory of all Pages on your Existing Website
Search Engine Optimisation considers every page of your website an asset. There are many ways to compile a list of all your pages:
- Use a crawler.
- Your sitemap should be used.
- Google's index of sites can be used.
- Use Google Search Console.
Use a Crawler
Screaming Frog is my favorite tool for crawling web pages. It costs $165 annually and can be used for much more than listing web pages. This cost-effective tool will not impact your small business marketing budget. Screaming Frog is free for websites with less than 500 pages.
If you are new to Screaming Frog, the User Guide will help you get started. Screaming Frog can be used to create an inventory of your web pages. It can also help you find technical SEO elements such as broken links, 404 pages, or missing HTML tags. It can also locate missing or duplicate meta descriptions.
Use Your Sitemap
You may already use an automated sitemap generator if you use content management software (CMS). This allows you to maintain a running inventory of all your pages. You may have an existing sitemap that you manually compiled if you don't use a CMS.
One typical example would be a WordPress site that uses Yoast SEO auto-generating a sitemap. If so, you can obtain a complete list of all your web pages from your Yoast SEO sitemap. Remember that a Yoast website map can only contain up to 1000 URLs and will not include pages you have labeled "no index."
Google's Index
For smaller websites, doing a Google search for "site:yourwebsite.com" will return results for all your unique pages that Google knows about today. Searching through the search results pages for larger websites takes time and effort. Google might have removed some pages from your site if it found them duplicates or determined that they needed to be more important to be included in its search results.
Google Search Console
You can access a complete list of all your pages if you are familiar with Google Search Console. You can filter your search results by pages and extend the date range to 16 months. This will give you a list of all URLs Google has identified over the past 1+ year. You can export the search results report to a CSV file by clicking the Export button at the top right.
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You can Test your Design on a staging Environment or Site
Once you have taken stock of your website, you can start redesigning it. It is essential to make changes to your website design in a staging (sometimes called a "device" or "test site") so that your SEO can be maintained.
Different development environments are necessary to prevent search engines from indexing an incomplete version of your site. Users shouldn't see pages in the process of being redesigned.
You can prevent search engines and users from detecting your work in progress by preventing your test site from being indexed. This can be done by:
- If using WordPress, click "Discourage search engines from indexing this website."
- Add a "no index" directive to each page by explicitly adding it as a meta robots directive.
- Your robots.txt file will allow you to block all robots crawling your site.
- Check out Your New Website.
If your website redesign were limited to "reskinning" existing pages, you wouldn't have much information to audit. You won't have to worry about SEO issues such as changing the color scheme or spacing between HTML elements with CSS. This will not affect your performance.
A complete website redesign SEO audit is necessary if you have undergone an extensive redesign. In a previous blog post, we provided a detailed guide on how to do a website SEO audit. This will allow you to identify duplicate or thin content that could cause your SEO rank to drop unexpectedly.
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3. Common Issues During a Redesign Audit
This stage is where most problems arise. Imagine that you are a medium-sized manufacturer of B2B machinery. You have three pages for calculating the payback period for your products. A web developer might copy the content from the two pages and put it on the third page.
These pages may have had backlinks from third parties. These backlinks will be lost in SEO, and users who click on them may need clarification. Your new website will display a "Page Not Found" placeholder. This issue can be avoided by setting up appropriate 301 redirects (we will discuss this in the next section).
In the second scenario, imagine your most popular page (about machinery payback calculations) was at https://www.yourwebsite.com/payback-calculation/. During your site redesign, a developer changed the URL to https://www.yourwebsite.com/payback-calculations/ (with an "s"). If not done correctly, changing URLs can have a significant SEO impact.
Search engines need several months to remove the URL from their index and index your new URL. Then, they would rank your page again from scratch. All backlinks that your old URL earned from third-party websites would be lost. You can avoid any loss of SEO value by setting up appropriate redirects (covered next).
4. Install 301 redirects
A 301 redirect forwards an existing URL to a URL you choose. This tells search engines that the 301 redirect is a permanent change.
You can keep most of the SEO value attributed to an old page when you use a301. Then, transfer it to your new page. Setting up the correct redirects is essential to optimize your site redesign SEO. This will maintain website functionality and allow you to make future link-building investments.
WordPress Websites
It's easy to implement a 301 redirect if you use WordPress. Redirection is a plugin by John Godley that I highly recommend. Follow the author's instructions to download it from the plugin directory in WordPress's backend.
Visit Other Websites
You may be using an alternative CMS to build your website. It may include a redirect function for pages. To determine if this is the case, consult the CMS's knowledge base or perform a quick Google search. You (or your developer) can create redirects within the. Access the file if your site is hosted on Apache.
Many domain providers allow you to set up redirects via their advanced DNS settings. This option is available to domain name providers. Ensure you record your actions so they are clear from other team members. You can also add a meta refresh code in the header of a page if all else fails.
You may already be familiar with SEO and have many 301 redirects. This is why the SEO checklist should include removing redirect chains from your website redesign. A redirect chain is when a URL is forwarded from URL A to URL B. When URL A is forwarded to URL B, it's usually forgotten about months or years later.
Every 301 redirect has historically decreased the SEO value passed every step of the process (though a Google spokesperson confirmed that this transfer does not dilute an SEO factor called "PageRank"). Users will benefit from eliminating these redirect chains, which can help you keep as much SEO value as possible.
To ensure that you don't redirect to the wrong page every time you redirect a page, you should search your 301 redirects. You can update the redirects to direct to your new destination page if it is. Also, URL A must not be redirecting URL B to URLC. If URL A redirects to URL B, you can update the 301 redirects directly to URL C.
5. Redesigned Website Activated
After completing the design work, your website is ready for users. Developers will usually do the heavy lifting, but it is up to you to ensure everything works as expected.
Remember in step 2 how you blocked search engines from finding your website? This functionality must be removed before your site's redesigned version can be activated. Marketers (and I have done it myself) have launched new websites with "no index" directives on every page. This caused the site to disappear in search results slowly.
With complex data backing your decisions, you can improve SEO strategies. It is essential to make sure your tracking codes are correctly set up and are collecting data. This includes Google Analytics, heat mapping, and social media pixels. This can positively affect your SEO strategy when you redesign your website.
6. Verify Robots.txt & Meta Robots
A robots.txt file may include an explicit link to the sitemap of your newly redesigned website. Your new sitemap can be included in the robots.txt files to make indexing and crawling for search engines as simple as possible.
As we discussed in step 5, ensure you are not preventing essential pages from being indexed. You can also check landing pages you don't want to be indexed. You should also ensure that any canonical links on your site to similar pages are working as intended.
7. Google Search Console Setup
This guide from Google will show you how to get started with Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools).
You should also include a link to your sitemap in your robots.txt files. In step 6, submit your sitemap URL as well to Search Console. Google can quickly identify and crawl all indexable pages on your newly redesigned website.
8. Track SEO Ranking Changes
This is the end of the process. You can now monitor new rankings, conversions, and overall performance data. Your marketing and executive teams now have access to your data. They can learn how to select marketing KPIs that are important.
Remember that a website redesign Search Engine Optimisation plan may take time to improve your SEO results. That's fine! You wanted to preserve the SEO value of your site.
If your UX team and designers succeed, your redesign will be more engaging and likely to convert customers. Slowly, longer dwell times and happier users will improve search engine rankings. So be patient!
Read More: 5 Most Important On-page SEO Techniques for Higher Ranking
You Should be Aware of Common Problems
Every website will have a different scenario. You need to know how this foundation approaches segments and breaks down metadata to retain SEO value during a redesign.
There are many common issues that SEOs, developers, and businesses all face:
- Communication - This is the biggest one, and why it's at the top of the list. Communication is essential. Web redesigns can be improved by better communication. Your SEO should be present at the initial strategy meeting. This will allow you to discuss the site with web developers and anyone with a connection. Keep the lines of communication open.
- Missing Metadata - Crawls are fickle. It is only possible to launch a new website with the correct information. Search engines will be forced to guess what you should put there. The results will be different from your liking.
- Content Missing - Too often, content must be given the credit it merits. Ensure you take the time to ensure the site has the correct content.
- Need to implement Redirects - This is an important step. The redirects must be appropriately implemented and work as intended after you have laid them out.
Avoid these Pitfalls when Redesigning Websites
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It is essential to Define the Scope and Requirements Before you Start Clearly
Redesigning a website often involves reworking the interface. Many businesses believe that changing the appearance of their website will increase their conversions. Many businesses choose vague metrics to measure success, such as "shiny" or "new," without considering the actual problems that their customers are facing.
Internal stakeholders can disagree because they need more data-backed insights or are dependent on vanity metrics. This leads to a website that could be better than the one already in place.
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Failure to Establish a Consistent Brand Positioning and Message
Your company's users are the ones that build your brand, not the others. Companies must have a consistent personality to elicit positive reactions from their customers. A consistent brand message can connect the company's audience, making them advocates.
It should reflect its personality through all its touch points with customers. The website is one of the most critical touchpoints. Newsletters, brochures, social media posts, or 404 pages.
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Unrealistic Timelines
Website overhauls typically take between 3-12 months. This can vary depending on how complex the project is. You can determine the time it will take to redesign your website by doing a thorough planning exercise. Planning involves qualitative research and brainstorming strategies to provide value for your customers and brand.
Redesigning a website is often part of an enormous strategic decision. Teams work backward from the day it was launched and then build incrementally to determine what can be accomplished within the mission window. This allows them to deliver the best possible result in the most efficient time.
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Prioritizing Design over Content (Prioritising form Over functionality)
Users visit websites with intention. Sites are often guilty of prioritizing aesthetics over content. Your website's functionality should always be the most important thing. This includes a simple and intuitive navigation system and well-placed CTA buttons with a concise copy. Focusing on the content and functionality of your website will help you in your Search Engine Optimisation efforts to drive more traffic.
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Your job is done When the Site goes Live
For the first few weeks following the redesign, it is essential to monitor the optimization health of your website. The rank should be monitored. You should also check Google Webmaster Tools for broken links and crawl errors. This can have a severe impact on your ecosystem. Remove your hazmat suit to clean up any errors immediately.
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Avoiding Technical Aspects and Site Performance
When a website is being overhauled, monitoring key technical aspects such as site speed, navigation, and mobile performance is essential. This is also true for site performance metrics like page load time, SEO sitemap, and mobile responsive UX. These key metrics will help you improve your website's optimization.
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Conclusion
Be clear about why you are embarking upon this company website redesign journey before you begin. Suppose your primary offering or target audience has changed. In that case, it is essential to rebrand your website to ensure that your new design can still convince them to buy from you.
- Before you begin with the redesign, make sure to audit your website. This will help you decide what should stay and what should be changed. Before you approve any design, test it thoroughly.
- Once you have identified the "why" behind your redesign project, you can identify a suitable agency. This will make half the work easier. To achieve the desired results, you would need to shadow the agency.
- With the help of your agency, create a roadmap for the entire redesign project. This will allow you to track progress at each stage. This will ensure your project is within the estimated time and cost.
