Redesigning your business's website is something you might eventually want to do. Whether you're doing it to update its look, improve user experience, or enhance its other features, you should carefully approach the process so it doesn't end up affecting your website's search engine rankings.
In this comprehensive SEO guide, you will learn how to accomplish your website redesigning project while preserving your site's search ranking. This checklist will cover general website SEO, technical SEO, and crucial steps like SEO audits to ensure your site remains search-engine-friendly from the beginning to the completion of the process.
That said, here are steps you should never ignore during the website redesigning process:
Set clear SEO goals
You should define your SEO goals before jumping into the redesign process. Having clear objectives helps guide your redesign strategy and ensure that SEO remains a priority.
Here are sample goals and what you should do:
Improve organic traffic by focusing on keyword research and optimizing your website's content.
Boost local search visibility by optimizing local SEO elements like Google Business Profile, local citations, and customer reviews.
Improve mobile performance by ensuring mobile-friendliness and fixing page loading speeds.
Ensure everyone involved in the redesign project is aware of your website SEO goals and works towards achieving them.
Conduct a thorough SEO audit
An SEO audit ensures you know where your website stands before you make any changes. It helps you identify what's working well, what requires improvement, and what errors might exist. Make sure your audit covers the following:
On-page SEO. Review your content, meta tags, headers, and how keywords are used.
Technical SEO. Check the site's structure, page speed, and mobile-friendliness.
Backlink profile. Evaluate the quality and number of backlinks to your website.
An SEO audit provides a foundation for necessary changes, so its importance cannot be overstated.
Mind the site's URLs and redirects
Redesigning the website can affect its URL structure and, possibly, its search ranking. If you need to change any URL, make sure to set up 301 redirects to inform search engines that the old page's contents have been permanently moved to a new location. This helps you preserve your pages' SEO equity and prevent broken links.
Tools like Screaming Frog can crawl your website and identify all existing URLs, making it easier to map out redirects.
Prioritize SEO-friendly content
Your website redesigning project must never sacrifice SEO-friendly content in favor of aesthetics. Take this opportunity to refresh and optimize your content for your target keywords by following these steps:
Keyword research. Find relevant keywords using tools like Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest and incorporate them into your page titles, headings, meta descriptions, and content.
Content optimization. Ensure that each page's content is unique, aligns with user intent, and provides value to site visitors. Make sure your content is readable, and avoid keyword stuffing.
Internal linking. Check and fix internal links to smoothen user experience and ensure search engines crawl your website more effectively.
Remember that search engines want to give users high-quality content. Failing to prioritize SEO-friendly content can negatively impact your website's search rankings.
Improve mobile optimization
Half of all web traffic is currently generated by mobile devices, so having a mobile-optimized website helps your business reach as many potential customers as possible. It also improves user experience and helps your site rank higher.
Your mobile optimization strategy should focus on these factors:
Responsiveness. Your website's layout should adjust seamlessly to different screen sizes.
Page speed. Reduce media file sizes and enable features that improve page loading speeds.
Mobile usability. Ensure that buttons are functional, text is legible, and navigation is straightforward even on smaller screens.
Google's Mobile-Friendly Test can help you ensure your site is mobile-friendly and all features work as intended.
Focus on technical SEO
Tech SEO forms the backbone of your site's performance in the search results. During the redesign process, you should focus on your site's technical aspects, such as:
Security. If your site isn't already using HTTPS, a redesign is the perfect opportunity to do so. Increasing security makes your website more trustworthy to users and search engines.
Indexing. Your site should be crawlable by search engines; otherwise, it won't be indexed properly and will not appear in the search results.
Site structure. Ensuring your website has a clear hierarchy and helps search engines make better sense of your content and improves user experience.
Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console let you track changes in traffic, rankings, and user behavior after making changes.
Update your XML sitemap
An XML sitemap helps Google and other search engines index your website's pages more efficiently. During the redesign process, ensure that changes are reflected on your sitemap. These include new pages you want to be indexed and ones you don't want to appear in the search results.
Additionally, review your robots.txt file—which tells search engine bots which pages to crawl and ignore—to ensure it's updated with your redesigned site's changes. Once done, submit your sitemap through Google Search Console.
Test and monitor performance
Just because your redesigned website is live doesn't mean you can call it a day. You should monitor its performance using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, looking for changes in traffic and rankings, as well as crawl errors.
Moreover, always check your site's health using regular SEO audits. This can help identify emerging issues that could affect your website's performance.
Website redesigning is an exciting opportunity to make your website more aligned with your brand, but it's also a critical opportunity to address flaws and improve its SEO performance. As long as you're conscious of your SEO goals and prioritize them throughout the process, you should end up with a website that looks and functions better while driving more traffic to your business.
If you don't know how to start and where to focus during your website redesigning project, don't hesitate to consult SEO experts.
