Website redesign: How to retain and improve your SEO

Have you noticed your website recently on a smartphone, is it well optimized? Is the text coming in small format?Is it providing the readability to the users? How is your graphics doing?Is it looking enticing? Is your site is up-to-date with the latest trends? Is your website content receiving the user’sattention? If you have just answered NO to the questions then, its time for you to sit and think about redesigning your website.

The redesigning of the website sounds a bit scary as you majorly worry about:

• What will happen to the authorities of the web pages that you have achieved so far?
• How it is going to impact the SEO of your website?

We will be discussing here the checklist of the measures that you should take before and while redesigning of the website which not just helps you to retain your SEO ranking on the search engines and the authorities your old site has but also help you to gain more visitors with the new design of the site.

1.) Keeping up with the current updates: It is very essential to know what is moving currently in the SEO related to keyword ranking, Topic ranking, voice searches, and many others. This will help you in creating a plan to decide what thought the process you should keep while building the new site.

2.) Impact of Redesign: As we mentioned that often we hesitant about going through the process of redesigning because we are scared of losing the user traffic we gained with the immense effort in the past years.
So, It is mandatory to focus on:

• Retaining the rankings and traffic with the new design
• Generating more traffic and improvement in the ranking

The best way to attain these is keeping the old site live but not letting the sites accessed by the crawlers. Having the old crawl data will help in matching the new site URLs with the old site. This will assist you in creating the smooth transition and avoiding complications with the URL structure error in the future.

3.) Minimize changes In the URL structure: It is always better keeping the URL structure and Page title, meta descriptions, headers and so forth the same, as this way the chances of going wrong will be minimized.

4.) 301 Redirect: It is first, and the foremost thing you should take care of when designing a new site. Create a sheet of old URL structure and ensure the smooth 301 redirections of all the URLs to the new website. 301 redirection minimises the loss of page authority.

5.) Internal and backlinks Report: Use the crawl data of the old website to diagnose the internal links of the webpages. Understand whether all the internal links have been achieved on the new pages or not as this will create a direct impact on the ranking of the page. Using webmaster tool and crawl data of the old website, get the analytics on the update of the backlinks to the new site so to get it indexed and rank quickly in the Google and Bing search engines.

6.) Google Search Console: Using Google search console you can diagnose 301 redirect and 404 pages, It will guide you through the details of what is working and what’s not, and later you can make the required changes and updates as per the report. The search analytics will also help you inmeasuring the traffic, impressions, CTR and average position.

7.) Content: If your old content is doing well and have been receiving a generous amount of traffic, don’t touch it for changes rather keep it as it is. But if this doesn’t makethe case then try to create more user engagement SEO content about your products, services to the site, write about latest topics focussing on your industry (take the assistance of Google Trends). This will help in generating more traffic to the website.

8.) XML Sitemap: As we want the search engines to understand our new sites changes quickly with the 301 redirects, site structure, and navigation,so submit your website sitemap to the search engines, i.,e Google and Bing.

9.) Monitor Site Traffic: While redesigning of the site, you can expect fluctuations in the page ranking. Run the analysis and find the changes in the web pages performance in the first month itself so you can work on the URL structure and keywords which will minimize the complication in the future.

10.) Technical Audit: Use the technical audit tools like Screaming frog, Deep crawl, Moz and other tools available online to run the audit of the new site to find the issues and resolve them before they start creating problems.

These are some of the points you should consider and put your eye on while redesigning your site. To make your redesign successful take the assistance of the professional and trusted agencies, who will not just ensure that your new website meets the latest trends in terms of design and performance but also retain and shower more traffic and revenue than before.