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How can you Avoid Disaster while Redesigning your Website?
For most businesses, website redesigns can be a nightmare. The redesign may improve some aspects of the website like the look and the conversion rate, but it can weaken some other aspects like SEO traffic.
Redesigning your website can destroy SEO prospects completely if you don’t keep it in mind from the very beginning. SEO is extremely sensitive and the search engines like Bing and Google crawl your website indexing the URLs and pages. When a website is redesigned, the URL may change. If the engines are not informed where the old URLs have moved, SEO disaster is the result.
What are the potential problems if SEO isn't considered in a redesign?
- Ranking drops
- ROI reduces
- Search traffic drops
So how do you redesign a website without creating an SEO disaster? Check out the steps to consider below.
Crawl the Existing Website
If you are not certain about the structure of your website, you are setting yourself up for a great fall.
Start by mapping out the website sections and pages. Once you have the structure and the meta data of the website, you can figure out how to go about organizing the new website.
Audit the Old Website
You can use free online tools to audit your website, but it’s always better to handle the job manually. Get into your website to find the problem areas and solve them. Figure out what areas are not being visited, what keywords are being used. You can do this by applying a website traffic analysis tool that tracks site usage over time. This information will help to spot the problem areas and devise a plan to affect change.
One of the most widely used analysis tools is Google Analytics. This will show you a list of pages that rank on Google and the ones that are indexed. This data will help you to understand which parts of the website are flourishing and which parts need improvement. It shows the SEO strategies that work and the ones that don’t. This will help with redesigning your website and improving SEO ranking.
Noindex the Development Site
This is simple, but this is the point where most redesigns go awry. While working on a website, you will never want Google to index it. If you have added great new content, it will certainly get indexed. If the new content is indexed on the development site, then when you launch the new website, this content will have little value since it’s duplicate.
Crawl Test Site
You need to understand how the development site is structured. With a site crawler, crawl the test site and find out how it looks. You can find the things that work on the new site and the things that don’t. This will also help to understand the things missing from the development site.
Consider the Inbound Links and the 301 Redirect Plan
Inbound links play a significant role in determining SEO power.
What can you do?
Ensure that the pages are migrated to the new website.
301 redirects acquire value if you point the old URLs to the new one. The 301 redirects safely pass the PageRank from the old to the new site. Life will be easier if you keep the URL structure the same while moving to the new website.
Keep a Backup
This is significant and this step should never be overlooked. Before replacing the old site with the new one, backup all the old files and any associated databases. Only after you have that done should you replace the old site with the new one.
Additional Checks
- Rank Check
Rank check measures the way a website performs for an array of keywords in search engines. Use this data as a comparison for the newly launched website. If there is any change, you can identify the problems while checking the results.
- Content
Avoid deleting content. You may think that the old blog posts are not required, but they are adding up to your credibility.
You need not change the landing page content if you are achieving good rankings.
- Analytics Code
This is self-explanatory. Place the analytics code back at the <head> section on every page you want to track the traffic for. This includes, but should not be limited to, check out on e-commerce pages, event tracking and goals.
If you can follow the above-discussed strategies, you can give your website a makeover while keeping it perfectly optimized. This will allow your website to have better ranking, higher conversion rates and lower bounce rates.
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Adam Frankel
Adam Frankel is President and CEO of Frankel Interactive, a leading South Florida digital agency specializing in custom websites development, ecommerce development and digital marketing. For over 15 years he's been working with businesses and government agencies to bring their organizations online in order to build brand awareness, communicate with stakeholders, generate leads and drive sales. His belief is that all businesses need to keep up with technological trends including the continual transition from desktop to mobile, search engine algorithms changes, and social media engagement. His goal is to help them implement strategies to successfully compete in an ever crowding digital marketplace. When he isn't touting the benefits of web-based marketing, he enjoys fishing and spending time on the waters surrounding Miami with family and friends.