How to Retain and Improve Your SEO After a Website Redesign?
When done right, redesigning your website should be a window of opportunity to refine your SEO, improve your digital marketing strategy, and boost conversion rates altogether. However, it might turn into a disastrous endeavor if you don’t take the right measures to ensure a trouble-free shift from the old to the new website. You might even end up harming the SEO value your website has grinded for years to build.
For a lot of businesses (if not most of them), organic search is the largest source of website traffic. And in such cases, SEO damage while redesigning your website can be fatal. Even though, at most times, with continuous effort, these issues may be resolved, it can be distressing for everyone involved. But with just a little planning and execution, one can easily avoid this whole unpleasant situation.
In this blog, we will discuss all the points that you must take into account while redesigning your website so that you can retain and improve your SEO.
3 Key Points to Remember
Retaining and ideally improving your SEO after redesigning your website requires you to keep these three points in mind:
- Grasping what works with your SEO presently
- Knowing the common issues that pop up during a website redesign
- A comprehensive plan of things that will change on the new website
Ideally, you should also try to identify the weaknesses of your SEO, which will help you pinpoint the areas that need to be improved or paid more attention to on the new website. Your aim must not be just to retain your SEO; instead, it should be to improve it.
- Grasping what works with your SEO presently
If you run and closely monitor (hopefully) your SEO campaigns, you will have a clear picture of what’s working for you currently – ranking keywords and topics, web pages driving organic traffic to your site, etc. Analyzing your current performance to find out what is working for you at present is the kind of insight that you need to feed into the thought process for your new website.
- Knowing the common issues that pop up during a website redesign
There are multiple reasons to opt for a website redesign – ranging from branding, technology to traffic, and lead generation. Here is a list of things that can typically change or be troublesome while redesigning your website:
- The content might get deleted (it won’t rank if it isn’t there)
- The content might be changed
- The content might shift within the website’s ranking
- URLs can change
- Page-level optimization can change
- New content may be added
- New sections may be incorporated into the website
- New features or technology might be used
- New technical issues may be introduced
- Internal link structure may change
- Your domain name can change
- Subdomain can change
- Protocol can change
Anyone of the above issues can damage your SEO and if there is more than one issue such as content getting removed or URLs changing, then identifying the root cause of the damage gets even more challenging.
If the redesign and domain name changes simultaneously, things can get furthermore tricky. It is highly advisable to avoid doing both of these at the same time because the more variables you bring in, the more problematic it will be to identify issues if they do emerge. An entirely new website with different content on a fresh new domain, all applied at the same time? – does not sound like a good idea.
- A comprehensive plan of things that will change on the new website
Now that you know what works (we covered this in the first point) and what might go wrong (we covered this in the second point), you can settle down to analyze your goals for the new website. However, your two primary goals must include:
- Retain the existing SEO rankings and website traffic
- Improve your SEO rankings and website traffic
Best Practices for a Smooth Website Redesign
With just a little bit of planning in advance, you can easily avoid any SEO calamities and maintain your site visibility while redesigning your website. What follows is a website redesign checklist that will help you in making sure that you are able to retain your invaluable SEO while launching your brand new website.
- Keep your old website live: If possible, try to keep your old website live on a temporary URL. Ensure that no web crawler is able to access that website. Some HTTP authentication is excellent, but having your former website available for you to access whenever you run into an obstacle can be a blessing. Usually, some parts of the website will be on the web archive, but nothing matches the benefit of having the real thing.
- Save crawl data: Whether or not you have the old site on a temporary web address, you should ideally save the crawl data of your old website so that you load it up in case you need to analyze it for some reason. There are many online tools that you can utilize to do this.
- Don’t fix what isn’t broken: Keep things the same wherever possible, especially URLs, to be precise. If you don’t change the URL structure or names of the web pages on your new site, then there are very fewer chances of anything going wrong. However, if you really need to make changes, then go ahead but ensure that they are justified for a common benefit and not simply done for the sake of fun or without any solid purpose.
- 301 redirects: Redirecting old URLs to the new ones needs to be on top of your list of priority tasks. If you can, keep the content on the same URLs only while redesigning your website. This is the ideal thing to do. But in case it’s not possible, then you might want to keep a spreadsheet of all URLs on your old as well as a new website so that you can execute and test your 301 redirects. Once your new website goes live, you should crawl the list of URLs from your old website (another use case of that saved crawl data we talked about in the second point) to make sure all of them are 301 redirecting appropriately.
- Content: On pages that have content that performs and ranks well, the ideal thing to do is to let it be or at least minimize the changes. You will get a bulk of opportunities to edit your content on the new website once the search engine has indexed and ranked it. But for now, avoid making too many changes.
- On-Page Optimization: Crawling your old website will let you export all the main on-page components such as headers, titles, meta descriptions, etc. Try to keep it the same as far as possible unless you feel there are improvements that must be made.
- Internal links: Pay attention to any changes in your internal link structure. Once again that saved crawl data will come in handy here. If you have web pages that had hundreds of links earlier but now barely have any, then this can dramatically impact that particular page’s rankings.
- XML Sitemap: Update and submit your XML sitemap to the search engines as quickly as possible. You need to have your 301 redirects, navigation, page structure, and XML sitemap aligned and demonstrating the new website structure to help the search engines grasp the changes as soon as possible.
- Track your organic traffic: It is not possible for you to rank-track all the keywords driving traffic to your website. Therefore you should also track traffic to your primary web pages to make sure there is improvement.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, in order to retain and improve your SEO while redesigning your website, you should keep these five points in mind:
- Know what works well on your existing website
- Identifying the areas that need improvement
- Planning out your new site carefully
- 301 redirecting all your old URLs to the new ones
- Tracking the results closely
A website redesign should be a chance to boost your SEO and conversions. However, with websites having organic search as their primary source of traffic, this needs to be accomplished with the utmost care to avoid any damage to your rankings or traffic. By following the steps discussed in this blog, you will only see positive changes in your new website.