How to Maintain and Improve your Search Engine Rankings during a Website Redesign
When it’s time to redesign your website, it’s also a great time to revisit your SEO strategy. Why?
Two reasons:
- To Maintain your existing rankings during the transition.
- To build upon and improve your rankings with the new website
First, let’s talk about the transition.
Maintain SEO Rankings During a Redesign
When you redesign a website, it’s helpful to run an audit on the website to ensure you are not carrying over any problematic issues to the new website that could hinder your search rankings. For example:
- Avoid importing duplicate content
- Avoid importing spammy Titles, Meta Descriptions, or Meta Keywords
- Avoid importing overly large images
Instead, when re-designing a website, take the time to re-visit your SEO strategy. It’s a great time to set benchmarks to where you are at in terms of traffic and keyword rankings and determine where you want to be in the next year.
Further, it’s a great time to determine what is working and what isn’t and plan the new site around how you can improve.
Improve SEO Rankings During a Redesign
If your existing website isn’t driving traffic to the important pages and you are not ranking for your important industry keywords, a redesign is the perfect opportunity to restructure your website.
During the redesign planning phase:
- Build the new site architecture around important keywords, establishing and SEO-friendly hierarchy to develop optimized landing pages.
- Establish a logical naming convention for URLs to incorporate keywords and ensure a clean URL structure.
- Establish a naming convention for Title tags to ensure they are strategic and non-duplicated. If the existing Title tags and Meta Descriptions are high quality, carry them over to the new site.
- Ensure 301 redirects are established on a 1:1 basis as close as possible. This will maintain rankings for old URLs and pass it on to the new URL.
- Check Google Search Console post-launch to clean up any crawl errors from old URLs missed in the 301 redirects.
These are just a few helpful items that will help improve SEO during the redesign. To fully optimize the website before and after launch, we recommend a SEO audit as well as working directly with a SEO specialist.
For more information about Pre-Launch and Post-Launch SEO Audits, check out this helpful article from Search Engine Land: Relaunching your website? Don’t forget an SEO audit!
