Importance of SEO for Website Redesigns
If your website isn’t working to its full potential, it might be time for a redesign. A website redesign involves extensive changes to your website. During a redesign, elements of your code, content, structure, and visuals can change drastically, giving your website a whole new look. Redesigning can make your site look more modern and up-to-date, it can make your visitors engaged too. SEO helps your website to be more appealing to your target audience. When you redesign a website, it’s important you avoid the pitfalls that can severely hamper your SEO. When doing a site redesign, there are a number of things to check to make sure that your rankings and SEO performance will not be negatively affected.
Checklist for a successful site redesign
1.Analyze all website pages
Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to see which pages on your site rank highest and which are most visited. center the move around them as those pages should get the shortest, typeable URLs that are easy to remember and share .make sure no errors or URLs are being excluded from Google’s index that should be indexed.
2. Set Up 301 Redirects
Simply deleting pages will cause 404 Page Not Found errors, which will negatively impact search engine rankings and traffic by essentially shrinking your site size and throwing away content. When you use a 301 redirect, it forwards an old URL to a new URL of your choosing. It also tells search engines that this is a permanent change, which is very important. When you use a 301, you keep most of the SEO value attributed to the old page by transferring it to your new page. Thus, setting up the right redirects is essential for the SEO of your website redesign. This preserves the functionality of the website and your previous investment in link building.
3. Rewrite or combine page content
Check out the rest of the pages that didn’t make it to the top. See if they can be modified in any way to get better results. Sometimes it’s just a matter of writing more engaging copy or changing the featured image. Rewriting some text would also go directly with the redesign itself, so this shouldn’t be overlooked.
4. Check 404 errors
404 errors could lead to many users clicking off your page and switching to a competitor. An increase in 404 errors is a highly undesirable result of a website redesign process. First, it creates a terrible user experience because website visitors can’t find what they’re looking for (despite Google suggesting it in search results). Search engines will degrade the site’s overall rating if 404 errors occur too often, so make sure all old URLs are getting the correct redirects. Regularly monitoring the analytics helps to see if anything has slipped through the cracks.
5. Keep an eye on internal linking
Removing some pages as part of the redesign will affect your internal linking. So, once you are done setting up redirects, you also need to fix your internal linking architecture. During the redesign, you have to find out which pages linked out to the web page that was removed or redirected during the redesign, you can use Website Audit reports for that. Once you find out the links you can use redirections, it would be better to update it directly instead. But the unnecessary chain of redirects affects the page load speed. Otherwise, the broken links will lead to a 404 error.
6. Monitor the changes
It is extremely important to pay attention to the analytics after the redesign is complete. Make sure to submit the new sitemap of the redesigned site and check if it indexes correctly. Also, pay attention to the dates when visitors search for changed content and adapt to the changes. Finally, you have to make sure there are no errors or URLs being excluded from Google’s index that should be indexed.
7. Audit Your New Website
Before the website is launched or sent to the client for launch approval, an SEO audit is performed on the website. This audit is similar to an audit we would perform on a live website, but modified to fit our web building process.seoauditor.in is a free site to get SEO audit reports and there you can get suggestions to improve your SEO. Preparing an SEO checklist is also an effective method of site auditioning.
Final thoughts
Redesigning a website can be a challenge for a small business. This is a particularly complex process that depends entirely on business needs and initial issues with the originating website. Especially when it comes to a large website with a lot of content, the redesign needs to be done properly so as not to damage existing rankings and improve the website’s SEO in the long run. So hiring a web design agency will make you stress less, and the redesign process will go smoothly. If you have any queries, feel free to contact us