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Redesigning Your Website? How to Avoid an SEO Disaster

You already know the importance of using the latest SEO best practices to put your site in front of your target market, and revamping your website can help you take your rankings to the next level. That being said, you need to make sure you’re working with the right team to guarantee that your organic visibility continues to grow once your redesigned website launches.

Here, we’ll explore why SEO can plummet after a site redesign, and what you can do to make sure the hard work your team is putting into your new site pays off.

When you’re redesigning your website, there are several factors that can throw off your search rankings if they’re handled incorrectly, including:

  • Changes in on-site target keywords
  • Removal or addition of page content
  • New URLs
  • Missing 301 redirects
  • Domain changes
  • Website performance changes

How Domains and URLs Affect Your Rankings

During the website redesign process, URLs tend to change. You’ll need to create functional 301-redirects to let Google know that your page has a new URL.

When you don’t create a 301-redirect, you’ll cause a 404 error for people trying to get to the now-defunct site. This can result in a drop in organic rankings and a decrease in site traffic. Google tends to lower rankings of 404 error pages.

If possible, retaining your original URL structure can make it less likely that you’ll see a dip in your organic ranking. Minimizing the number of 301-redirects your site needs can also help you keep your current rankings.

While it can be tedious, individually mapping old URLs using a service like Screaming Frog can lessen the effect of changed URLs. Doing this takes work, but it can help to ensure that Google can take site visitors to the correct URL.

If possible, you’ll want to avoid a total change to your domain name. For example, changing your website from “bestsite.com” to “bestsiteever.com” runs the risk of losing traffic in the event that some of your redirects are not working properly. Even if everything with your domain switch goes perfectly, setting up a new domain can cause Google to wipe your site’s history clean—essentially making you start from scratch, erasing all the SEO progress you’ve made with your current site.

Webpage Content Changes

Keyword phrases are invaluable when it comes to your site’s SEO ranking, and redesigning your website can wreak havoc on your keyword success if you’re not careful. Your ranking depends largely on how relevant your content is to certain keyword phrases.

If you’ve realized that your current content isn’t the right fit for your audience, it makes sense to change things up. The more drastically your website changes, the higher the possibility of seeing a major dip in SEO. Google will reevaluate your website’s content, which will likely result in you losing some potential customers while gaining others.

Website Builders

It’s easier than ever to build a website, and it’s important to keep SEO in mind as you’re giving your current corner of the internet a facelift. You need to choose the platform that’s the right choice for your industry while also creating a site that is built to meet Google’s performance metric standards.

Consider the Crawlers

It’s not as creepy as it sounds—crawlers are what Google uses to test your site; these are also known as GoogleBots. When you’re working to check out your site in a “live” environment, you’ll want to block the crawlers so that they’re not assessing your site before it’s finished.

Once you’re ready to launch to the public, it’s essential that crawlers are unblocked. If you keep crawlers blocked after your site is launched, your site will be removed from organic search, making it far more difficult to reach your target market.

Tips for Maintaining and Boosting SEO During a Redesign

There are three key factors you’ll want to handle with care during the redesign of your site: top keyword rankings, traffic, and links. Pages that get backlinks or regular organic traffic should be kept identical (or as close as possible) to what they were previously. You’re much more likely to see a rank increase when you get rid of pages that aren’t getting views.

Identifying your SEO assets is an important first step in figuring out what pages to keep and where you want to change it up. If you have a page that receives backlinks, gets heavy traffic, and ranks highly for your target keywords, hang on to them. Use more than one SEO tool to discover which pages are performing best for you, as data can differ from one tool to another.

You’ll also want to consider which of your pages has the most internal links to other pages within your site. Pages with higher numbers of internal links carry a higher equity, making it easier for them to rank well. Removing internal links can have the opposite effect, tanking your SEO efforts.

Discover Your Top Organic Traffic Contributors

It’s not enough to know that you’re getting traffic—you also need to know where it’s coming from. Understanding how your viewers are learning about your site can help you tailor your style and content to the type of content they’re normally looking for (for example, if most of your traffic comes from Instagram, you’ll likely want to put some focus on including high-quality images on your landing page).

Search Control: Digital Marketing & SEO Tailored to Your Needs

If you’re feeling overwhelmed at the idea of boosting your SEO while you’re in the middle of a site redesign, we’re here to help. At Search Control, our in-house team has been serving businesses with SEO and digital marketing services since 2009. Reach out to us today to get started and learn more about taking your business to the next level.

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