By Owen Fay . Posted on February 22, 2023Having a website redesign is an exciting opportunity to revamp your digital presence and improve SEO, conversion rates, and overall digital marketing. However, it can also be a potential disaster if the right steps aren’t taken to ensure a smooth transition from the old website to the new one.
This could potentially damage the SEO equity that has been built up over time.
In this article, we will look at everything you need to consider during a website redesign to retain and improve existing search engine rankings and traffic.
We’ll explore topics such as SEO audit, content optimization, link-building strategies, server-side redirects, monitor analysis, and more – all of which are essential for preserving your rankings after launching your new site design. So let’s dive in!
What Is a Website Redesign?
A website redesign is a process of completely changing a website’s design, content, and structure. It can include a range of activities, such as re-platforming to a different CMS, changing existing page layouts, creating new content pages and functions, or simply updating visual elements on the website.
A successful website redesign should aim to improve user experience (UX) while retaining or improving current SEO rankings.
The Importance of Maintaining SEO Rankings After a Redesign
At some point, it becomes necessary for businesses to redesign their website. This could be to revamp the look and feel, add new features, or enhance the user experience. However, when undergoing a website redesign, one of the most significant considerations should be how to retain SEO rankings.
Missing out on SEO can have a massive impact on your business’s ability to compete in organic search results and can mean losing out on valuable clicks and leads that could have been driven through your website.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website so that it ranks as highly as possible in search engine results. The higher you rank in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, the more likely prospects will discover your website and do business with you.
Therefore, companies must take steps to maintain their SEO after a redesign so that they don’t lose any existing rankings or potential customers due to falling ranking positions.
Fortunately, there are several steps you can take to ensure that your hard-earned SEO rankings remain intact during and after a website redesign:
Step By Step Guide on Retaining SEO Ranking After a Redesign
To ensure your site and its content maintain their ranking in search engine results pages (SERPS) after a redesign, don’t wait for the dust to settle before taking action.
Follow these simple steps to keep your SEO ratings up and running once your new website is live:
1.) Perform an SEO audit:
An SEO audit is a must if you want to retain your SEO ranking and ensure that your site continues appearing on google search results post-redesign.
Luckily, it doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming; by simply performing some due diligence and comparing before and after screenshots with the google search console, you can quickly identify any changes made visually within the site or overlooked aspects that could potentially affect your ranking.
Other than fixing such errors, tracking the performance of specific ranking factors can also help you gain better visibility in google search results.
To maximize your impact from an audit, consider testing the brand-new elements this time, do an external assessment of your website’s relations, and study the technical architecture.
In today’s world of constantly evolving google algorithms, performing a thorough SEO audit post-redesign is perhaps the best way to maintain your hard-earned rankings.
2.) Create a plan:
Re-designing your website is an important part of maintaining a successful online presence. But without creating a perspicuous plan to make sure your search engine ranking doesn’t suffer, you could be tossing search engine results page rankings out the window.
You need to ensure that the search engine algorithms can still crawl through your content and connections with other websites, so take the time to create a thoughtful plan to keep your search engine ranking stable after a redesign.
Doing this will save you from going through any unneeded complications in the future. So before you go ahead with a redesign, make sure to hash out all the details for how you’ll maintain SEO. That’s half the battle!
3.) Monitor redirects:
When redesigning a website, ensuring that your google ranking and search engine results pages (SERPs) stay consistent is critical. To do this, monitoring redirects during the redesign process is essential.
Technical SEO experts understand why it’s important to keep track of pages within the SERPs — including homepage titles, meta descriptions, and other content changes.
Redirects can generate backlinks to existing or new pages, helping maintain existing page rankings and reach potential customers through keywords and improving overall site visibility.
So when considering any sort of website makeover or overhaul to secure a strong google ranking and prosperous SEO strategy, remember: don’t forget to monitor those redirects.
4.) Update content:
When it comes to redesigning a website, most people think of the look and feel of the page. While the aesthetics are important, something that’s often overlooked is how updating content will help retain your SEO ranking and keep website visitors coming back for more.
This includes updating keyword research, meta descriptions, anchor text, and internal links – after all, imagine how lost your visitors would feel if they clicked on a link only to land on a different page than expected!
When these changes are made consciously with SEO best practices in mind, website owners can keep their ranking and optimize returns from search engine results pages. Content writing can basically be your anchor which allows you to sink in all new traffic and metrics and keep them on the long run.
5.) Optimize for mobile devices:
Retaining SEO ranking after a website redesign is important, and optimizing for mobile devices is key. Not only do other search engines like Bing and Yahoo use mobile-first indexing, but Google rankings have switched to this as well.
This means that when users search for something on their phones first, your website must be optimized for smaller screens to show up in the rankings. Otherwise, you might miss out on organic traffic from those searching for what you offer.
So if you want to keep your SERPs’ positions intact after revamping your online presence, make sure to optimize for mobile devices too!
6.) Monitor analytics:
When redesigning a web page, core web vitals and the Google Analytics tool are essential for understanding, tracking, and ultimately retaining SEO rankings.
Monitoring analytics from launch to post-launch is especially important during a redesign, so any new changes can be implemented to stay ahead of metric variances.
Not only can core web vitals provide insights into how quickly your website loads and how intuitive your user experience is, but they also enable you to better understand how visitors interact with your site: aiding in the process of creating further optimization opportunities.
Proper monitoring allows you to retain your online brand presence and remain proactive against potential penalties due to unexpected increases in loading times and other core measurements.
7.) Check backlinks:
When you’ve decided to redesign your website, comes the realization that you may have a small hiccup in your SEO.
It’s important to check your backlinks after a redesign to ensure that your organic search ranking doesn’t drastically decline. Without examining these links and ensuring they are still active, you could unknowingly be damaging your site’s SEO exponentially.
If some of these links were changed when re-designing, go ahead and update the URL in any external sources pointing to those pages.
Taking this proactive measure is key since it allows your Google rankings to remain consistent with minimum effort on your part; making sure that any hours spent on the website redesign don’t go to waste!
Mistakes to Avoid When Redesigning a Website
When redesigning a website, there are several mistakes to avoid to ensure a successful outcome. These include:
- Not analyzing your current web design
- Not setting goals
- Prioritizing aesthetics over functionality
- Not setting a plan for enough budget
- Forgetting about existing content
- Not managing site bandwidth upfront
- Not prioritizing accessibility
- Compromising user experience for aesthetics
- Focusing too much on design and not SEO
- Not checking and preserving existing page rankings
- Not trashing underperforming content
- Using unsuitable images for websites
How Poll The People Helps you When Redesigning Your Website
If you’re looking for a way to quickly and easily test your website redesigns before going live, Poll the People software can help. With Poll the People, you can get real user feedback in just an hour, allowing you to make informed decisions about your website redesigns.
Poll the People is a market research platform that offers micro-surveys to tap into the “wisdom of the crowds”. This allows you to get real insights from real users, giving you valuable feedback on how people interact with your website. You can use this data to identify areas where your website could be improved and any potential issues or problems that may arise when launching your redesigned site.
Poll the People also offers A/B testing capabilities, allowing you to compare different versions of your website and see which performs better. This helps ensure that your redesigned site is optimized for maximum performance and usability.
With Poll the People’s pre-live usability testing platform, you can make data-backed decisions faster and cheaper than ever before. Get real user feedback in just an hour, and make sure that your redesigned site is ready for launch! Sign Up NOW!!
Wrapping up
Taking the right steps during a website redesign can help you retain your SEO rankings and drive more organic traffic.
To ensure a successful transition to a new website design, analyze current web design elements, set realistic yet ambitious goals, prioritize functionality over aesthetics, plan for enough budget, manage site bandwidth upfront, and check existing page ranking before launch. Plus, pay special attention when it comes to content preservation and optimization of mobile devices.
By following these best practices throughout the process of launching or redesigning your website, you can make sure that you reap all the rewards of having an optimized online presence without any major hiccups along the way!
The main takeaway here is that by taking the right steps and avoiding common pitfalls during a website redesign, you can help ensure that your SEO ranking remains intact. With a careful and thorough planning process, you should be able to retain (or even improve!) your SEO rankings, resulting in more organic traffic and higher conversion rates. Best of luck!
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