Guide to Redesign Your Site Without Losing SEO
In the world of digital marketing, your prospects and customers will judge your site by its appearance. This means that you will need to update and redesign your site regularly to make it more appealing to your target customers.
Contrary to somewhat popular belief, search engine optimization (SEO) is not done only once but required a long-term commitment. While you will need to update your SEO content now and then, you need to ensure all changes that don’t negatively affect your SEO rankings.
To avoid letting the hard work that you put into SEO go to waste, you should know how to redesign your site without losing SEO. In this guide, we share our step-by-step guide on how to redesign a website without losing your SEO rankings.
Why you Should Consider SEO in A Redesign
A website redesign is a worth marketing investment intended to engage your visitors and convert your target audience to customers. However, doing it in a quick way without prioritizing the SEO factors can lead to severe consequences.
SEO is like a marathon game. It takes months and even years to get positive results from SEO. With all of the hard work and persistence that goes into doing SEO, you probably don’t want to lose these valuable assets. A good high ranking brings your business more traffic and leads, all of these visitors are likely to become you’re paying customers. For that reason, redesigning your website considering SEO can result in a revenue decrease.
How to Redesign a Website Without Affecting SEO
If you already have a healthy organic traffic standing, then you should know how to redesign your site without losing your rank. Follow a step-by-step process below on how to redesign without affecting SEO.
Step 1: Consider your SEO rankings
Before you proceed forward with a redesign, you need to do a website audit to understand your current SEO standings. If your site is out of date, has a low loading time, or has too much technical troubleshooting, you should definitely redesign your site. If your site is currently not ranking very high on search engines, then you won’t really miss it.
On the other hand, if you have a good SEO rank, you should carefully rethink doing a redesign. To check your current SEO performance, use analytics, and look at which keywords are bringing you good traffic. Make a note of these keywords and your metadata.
Now you should analyze your current link structure since when you redesign your website, you may end up changing the current URL structure - crawling your entire site to understand your site structure. If your existing site is doing well, you should keep the architecture intact. If not, you can skip this step.
Step 2: Check Your Current SEO Standings
Now you should analyze your current link structure since when you redesign your website, you may end up changing the current URL structure - crawling your entire site to understand your site structure. If your existing site is doing well, you should keep the architecture intact. If not, you can skip this step.
Step 3: Keep Your Old Website Alive Until Ready to Update the Redesigned Version
Do NOT redesign directly on your existing website. It can cause all sorts of issues such as loss of information or interruptions when your visitors check out your website. Keep it alive until you’re ready to launch the redesigned website.
Step 5: Create 301 Redirects
If specific pages are performing well for your target keywords, you want to preserve your original content and URL tag. However, if you change the URLs on your pages, make sure to implement 301 redirects between old and new URLs. This step will ensure that your SEO work stays intact and that all of your valuable backlinks are preserved. The process can be complicated, but you can use plugins to make it easier.
Step 6: Test The Site
With your design changes in place, you need to test and do on-page optimization before it launches.
Check for broken links and ensure all website functions are working
Check titles, headers, meta-descriptions, and the body of the content
Check all redirects if have implemented any
Check all content, images, and forms
Do Page Speed Insight and Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
Check the site map and look for any 404 errors
Copy the tracking codes to the new website design so that you don't lose any valuable data
Make sure you double-check before publishing your website.
Above are the steps you want to follow if you plan to redesign your site without affecting SEO. However, it’s not a good idea if you’re going to do this on your own. To avoid irreversible faults, you should hire an SEO professional who knows how to redesign a website while maintaining your SEO standings. We have an expert team of designers and SEOer. Our experts know how to implement all these steps to redesign your website without losing SEO, please reach out to us to see how you can benefit from us.
