How to Maintain Your Website’s SEO After a Redesign

A total site redesign is a tricky thing. At some point, you must redesign your site, but when you do, you run the risk of your traffic dropping off. Redesigning a site is one of the biggest SEO challenges that a company can face.

If you are currently redesigning your site or planning on a full site renovation in the future, here’s what you need to identify:

What should you do during the redesign process?

While you are redesigning your site, you need to keep a few things in mind. Some of these things may not seem important to you, but leaving any of them out is an easy way to cause a huge traffic drop.

Never take down your site

At no point should you pull your old site offline unless it needs to go under for a few minutes as you launch the new design. When visitors encounter a website that says “sorry, we’re under construction” for several weeks, traffic declines before the new site goes live.

Re-examine your keyword strategy

Redesigning is the perfect time to evaluate your existing keyword strategy. Take a look at your organic keyword traffic, and find out if your site could be gaining traffic from any new long tail keywords.

Optimize all content with right keywords

You should also be reviewing content on each page prior to your site redesign. Sometimes things can get changed in the process. Titles are altered; meta descriptions are dropped; and SEO gets marginalized. Don’t let this happen to you. Instead, pay close attention to optimizing all content on all pages.

Maintain the same URL structure as much as possible

If you can, keep your URL structure the same. Whenever you change a site’s URL structure, you lose vast amounts of traffic from inbound links.

Create a comprehensive 301 URL redirect mapping strategy

Nearly every site redesign will have some pages that will be mapped to a new location. It’s important to have a complete plan in place for redirecting every such page. Every single rewritten URL must have a 301-permanent redirect.

Create an effective customized 404 error page

Since the new site will probably experience a few 404s, you should have an optimized 404 page in place.

Create new sitemaps (HTML and XML)

You should always have an up-to-date sitemap, but it’s especially important for a site launch or redesign. If any content has moved to new URLs, the sitemap can help the search engine discover these new locations.

Put tracking codes in place

When you’re sure everything is ready, place your analytics tracking code in the page source. Any conversion landing pages should also be tracked with the relevant codes.

Watch the Google index status

Keep an eye on how things are indexing in Google. You want to make sure that Google is indexing your entire site.

Watch your traffic

Traffic is a critical metric for measuring the success of your new site’s SEO. Keep close tabs on everything that happens with your traffic patterns.

A redesign should be an opportunity to improve your SEO and conversion rates. However, for sites with strong organic search traffic, this should be undertaken with care to preserve your SEO. Following the instructions in this article should ensure you only see positive improvements. For further information, get in touch with us at +91-98367-81929.

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