After deciding you want a new website, it can be hard to focus on anything besides the new design or features. Carrying over all the SEO elements is just as important, if not more, to maintain SEO ranking. The risks of losing traffic, losing valuable website information, and even losing SERP rankings are real issues that can cause long-term damage – but can also be easily prevented. Keep reading below to learn some more things you can do to mitigate any damage to your business.
Monitor Your Website
Monitoring everything will help you make sure that nothing is wrong with the website and will help you retain SEO ranking. You can save yourself a lot of suffering by simply monitoring everything from the start. The moment you decide to rework or redesign your website, make sure to invest in SEO tools or specialists to monitor this process for you. As a business owner, you have other things to worry about than monitoring your website launch – so let us take care of that! By utilizing SEO monitoring tools or experts, we will make sure to keep tabs on keyword rankings, organic traffic from search engines, the total number of backlinks, domain authority, and much more.
URL Consistency & Redirects
Make sure your URL on each page is the same as the original, this is one of the most important parts of migrating your website over to the new site. Google and other search engines will index the site, but It takes time and it takes even longer to help those pages rank. The last thing you want to do is remove a page that has a strong SEO ranking and not replace it with an equivalent. Setting up redirects is another way to make sure that all links are directed to the correct page. A 301 redirect will tell the search engines that the URL of a page has changed, and ensures that website visitors will be redirected to the updated URL.
Content & Headings
While a new website design is a great opportunity to refresh your content, if the old content and headings are consistently performing well, carrying them over is a must. This is a simple process and is the only time that copy and pasting are encouraged. In addition to content and headings, make sure you update the page titles and meta descriptions of your new site using strong keywords.
Resubmitting Your Sitemap
Once your site is live, make sure that you go into your google search console account and monitor the site. If you verified your GSC through HTML you may have to reverify. If it isn’t verified, then no information will be getting pulled. Re-submitting your sitemap and making sure your website is verified is critical in ensuring that GSC is doing its job and monitoring all aspects of the website and its presence on google.
Contact Boston Web Marketing
Almost all components on your will carry over, nonetheless, keeping track and monitoring it doesn’t hurt. Even with everything done right, your site may still see a temporary dip in traffic when switching sites. If you’re thinking about a new website design, moving to a new platform, or simply need help with getting your website to rank, we can help you! Give us a call at 857-526-0096 or contact us here for more information.