Making changes to a website is common; the brand evolves, or the site’s appearance becomes obsolete. But in doing so, you have to think beyond what it looks like. You have to take into account the positioning and what has been achieved so far. As an SEO agency, we will tell you how to plan the redesign of your website with SEO in mind.
When is it necessary to redesign the web?
All website owners wonder at some point if their website needs a makeover. Over time, businesses or brands seek to renew themselves, make a difference from the competition or update their appearance.
Perhaps the design of your site is old, and you want to adapt it to market trends.
Then that question comes to your mind: when is the best time to redesign your website? Any change you are going to make must be planned and have a specific objective. Modifying takes work, requires an investment of resources, and also has its risks. Therefore, you must be clear about what you want to do and why.
Among the reasons that lead to wanting a new design on the web, we find the following:
- Your current appearance looks unprofessional, or the design is outdated.
- There are web design errors that must be corrected to improve the customer experience.
- The design is similar to that of other websites, perhaps due to using the same template, and you need to differentiate yourself.
- You have made changes to the corporate image of your business, and these should be reflected on the site.
- You want to optimize the web and improve the information architecture.
- The web does not yet have a responsive design, and you fear a penalty from Google.
What are the risks of redesigning a website?
SEO-Oriented Web Redesign Modifying the website is a delicate job and must be done with great care. Some changes are focused only on the aesthetic aspect, but this is not always the case. Most of the time, elements such as categories, URLs, among others, are affected. This will have consequences for your SEO positioning.
When you redesign your website, you should know that it will lose its positioning if you move the content from where it is. And the URLs will lose the authority they have gained. Modifying any of the site’s URLs is the trickiest part of the process for that reason. However, you can take steps to prevent it 0 from affecting SEO, such as 301 redirects.
Also, when adding new categories, the traffic to the others may be affected by the change.
Either way, the redesign not only involves these risks, but they are an opportunity to make the website more attractive to the public. Also, if you take the necessary measures, you will maintain and even improve your current positioning.
Because it is a delicate job, it is best to hire a specialized web design company. This will help you have a site adapted to trends and know the SEO rules.
How to plan your website redesign with SEO in mind?
Redesigning your website without losing positioning is possible. To achieve this, you must think about SEO from the beginning. Please do not make any changes without considering how it will affect you and your alternatives to solve it. Sure, some modifications are unavoidable for the good of the web.
If you apply a redesign, you want to attract more visits, improve the user experience and get more conversions. If you don’t take search engine optimization into account, you won’t get it. Avoid the SEO consequences of a website redesign by following the following steps.
Take SEO into account from the start
To increase visits and conversions on your website, you must understand the importance of search engines. That’s where most of the users come from, so you have to be visible on the results pages.
And to earn a place in the first place, you have to do SEO. It would be best to stay updated on the practices recommended by Google and the rest of the search engines. So you can apply them in the new version of your site.
Do an SEO audit
Before making a change to improve your website, you should know where it is at the moment. This will determine precisely what updates you need to do. Analyze all the necessary details; there are online tools that will help you do it. It is technical and tedious work, so hiring an SEO professional is the best alternative, especially if your subject knowledge is limited.
- Among the elements to evaluate, we find:
- Most viewed pages.
- Better tactics to generate leads.
- Robots.txt files.
- Backlinks and broken links.
- Site Map.
- Meta tags.
- Site structure.
- The general performance of the web.
Analysis and inclusion of keywords
This is the right time to evaluate the performance of the keywords you have used so far. It may be necessary to optimize the pages of your sites for new terms. Remember that the way people search the Internet changes.
Identify the most used terms in your sector and include them, always in a planned way.
Configure 301 redirects
Setting up 301 redirects is one of the trickiest steps3. If the path to access any of the pages changes and you do not notify the search engines, a 404 error will occur. This isn’t good for SEO and the user experience.
The 301 redirect tells search engines that the URL has changed and tells where to take users looking for the old address.
To avoid problems, before making the changes, make a list of all the web pages and identify the ones that will change. So you can do the redirects in an organized way. You can do them manually or with the help of plugins that take care of this.
Optimize the URL structure
Optimize the structure of your site’s URLs. These should include the keywords you are optimizing for without being too long.
URLs must be friendly. The slug, the part of the URL that comes after the domain name, must have a maximum of 5 words.
When changing the URL structure of existing pages, you must implement 301 redirects.
Eliminate phantom backlinks
Address changes also mean that links you receive from other sites will stop working. These include banners on other websites, advertisements, content on social networks or websites that have linked to your site. Change all the ones under your control by adding the new URL. And inform the webmaster of other sites to update the addresses on other websites or blogs.
Take the opportunity to eliminate the backlinks that come from sites of little authority or that are spam.
Implement responsive design
On our website, we have insisted on the importance of making the web look good on any device. The reason is that Google penalizes sites that are not mobile-friendly. And that’s why today, most searches are done on these devices.
If your site does not look good on the Smartphone screen, the bounce rate will increase, and the search engines will not like it. So you have no excuse to delay this change any longer.
Make search engines find you.
Search engines have robots that crawl the web for new pages. For them to find you and index your site, you must make their work easier. For this, you can offer them the information they need using Schema Markup; in this way, they will understand your content.
While you apply the redesign, the two versions should not be available on the web. Lock the new version while you finish the design. Once it’s ready, be sure to unlock it for bots to find it.
Use analytics tools
Add the new version of the web to Google Search Console. This way, you can track the performance of the site. After applying the changes, you will be aware of the web traffic and other statistics to know how it works.
Put yourself in the visitors’ shoes
Think like visitors; put yourself in their shoes and see if the site is easy to navigate. Remember that if the structure is complicated, it is most likely that the user will leave without doing anything.
Increase your value proposition and offer engaging content to potential customers.
In this way, you already know how to plan the redesign of your website with SEO in mind. However, you should be clear that positioning will always be affected in one way or another. To avoid negative consequences, hire experts to do it for you.
If you are looking for a leading website redesign agency, you can ask for a budget in our company, and we will help you. Our dedicated and skilled designers have comprehensive foundational skills to deliver a visually appealing website. Contact us!
If you have any queries related to the topic, don’t hesitate to ask us. Ask your queries in the given below comment box!
