Search engine rankings are one of the most powerful predictors of organic traffic to a website. Unfortunately, in many cases, website redesigns can have a negative impact on your search ranking. If you’re wondering how to redesign a website without compromising SEO rankings, you’ve come to the right place. The following tips will help you get the most from your website while protecting all the SEO work that has been done.
Tip 1 – Think SEO First
Before you begin a website redesign, take some time to think about your Search Engine Optimization. You want to hold onto most of the content from your original site and make efforts to redirect URL to historical pages.
Tip 2 – Crawl your Site
An SEO crawl provides a map of how your site is set up. Tools like Screaming Frog can capture important structural components as well as meta data and URLs so you can match up your new site.
Tip 3 – Audits Can Be a Good Thing
When we’re talking about audits, we’re not always talking income tax. An audit of your current site can provide very useful information for your redesign. There are free tools available for site audits, but a manual audit will always be more thorough.
Based on the data you collect after your crawl, you want to check for missing or duplicate page titles, page titles over 512 pixels or under 200 pixels, missing, duplicate, or multiple H1 tags, missing or duplicate meta descriptions, meta descriptions over 923 pixels, canonical tags, canonicalization, broken links, and image alt text.
In an ideal world, your audit will also check for XML sitemap, robots.txt, duplicate content, pages indexed by Google, site performance and speed.
After your audit, you’ll know where to focus the most effort in your redesign.
Tip 4 – The Benefits of Noindex
While you are working on your test site, you don’t want Google to index it because you run the risk of indexing duplicate content when you launch your new site.
In order to noindex your site, you can either choose the “noindex” box in your site’s content management system or you can block the site in the Robots.txt file.
Tip 5 – Crawl the Test Site
Crawling your test site will help you understand how it is structured.
Tip 6 – Thoroughly Analyze your Data
Analyzing the data you collected from your audits and crawls, you’ll find the URLs that are not working and need to be corrected. You’ll also be able to more easily match up the data from the old site to your redesign. Once you’ve discovered URLs from the old site that don’t exist on your redesign, you can either redirect or remove these URLs.
Tip 7 – Some Additional Checks
Before you launch your new site, you should conduct a rank check. In your rank check, you’ll get an idea of how your new site performs for particular keywords. If you notice problems during this check, you can be proactive about solutions. Look for URL changes or changes to the meta data. Check for pages with missing content and ensure redirects are working properly. Also, check for noindex tags.
When it comes to content, don’t delete anything unless it’s absolutely necessary. Even the oldest blog posts can add credibility to your site, and you don’t want to lose that. Also, ensure your analytics code is in the <head> section of your site, and check ecommerce tracking, goals, and event tracking if you can. Finally, unblock your site to see if search engines can index it.
Now, here’s a summary checklist that will help you ensure you’ve maintained your SEO in your site redesign:
- Review your SEO
- Crawl your current site
- Audit your current site
- Noindex your test site
- Crawl your test site
- Find and update URLs
- Crawl updated URLs
- Check test site meta data
- Find and correct 404s
- Map your 301s
- Optimize new pages
- Verify implementation
- Run final checks
- And go!
