Sometimes, it can be necessary to redesign and rebrand your website. This can happen if you decide to take your business in a different direction or want a new look for your company. Google is constantly changing what it prioritizes in websites, making it crucial to revisit your website design occasionally.
Redesigning can be daunting and, if done incorrectly, could impact your Google ranking. However, there are some things that you can do before, during, and after to maintain your website’s SEO value. This post will cover the following:
Audit Your Current Site Pages
Your site’s SEO value is tied to its different pages. We recommend performing an audit of all the pages on your site to identify which pages are performing best. You need to know what to keep and what to change. Things to look for include pages with high traffic and conversions and the current rankings for each page. Additionally, be aware of the current URLs through your website to ensure that you can set up the most efficient redirects so all URLs are working and accounted for.
Our team utilizes tools like Google Search Console to gain insight into your site’s SERP performance, page indexing, and mobile usability. If you’d prefer the professionals to handle it, contact us at Boston Web Marketing.
Preserve Valuable Content
Although scrapping all content during the designing process can be tempting, this is one of the biggest mistakes you could make. After identifying what pages perform the highest during the website audit, you can use that to decide which content contributes most to your rankings. You can ensure this content is carried over and added to the new website during the design process.
Content is among the highest contributing factors to your rankings and is still a huge priority for Google bots. You can always make design changes to the pages—i.e., page layout, colors, and fonts—and alter sentences if needed. Still, we recommend keeping the topic and most of the content the same.
Redesign on Staging URL
This step can often be overlooked, but you should never go through a redesign on your existing domain. This can lead to confusion for users visiting your site and for Google. The best approach is to build your new site on a staging or temporary URL. After the site is complete, we can transfer it to your main website domain.
At this point, we will ensure that all metadata is optimized using the information from the site audit and high-performing pages. It’s important to note that while you should keep the content, URL structure, and metadata from high-performing pages, the pages that don’t have intense traffic can be adjusted and re-optimized.
Set Up 301 Redirects
This is another important step to ensuring you retain all SEO value. This passes any SEO equity from your original site to the new design. That said, correctly implementing the redirects to the relevant target page is crucial. There is a lot to learn about setting up 301 redirects and the benefits, but there are a few things to keep in mind during a redesign:
- The redirect process is much simpler if you don’t change the domain name or URL structure. Typically, a redirect is unnecessary unless you change individual pages’ names and URL structures.
- If there are pages you don’t intend to keep on the new site and no relevant page to set up a redirect for, it’s best not to redirect at all and instead create a custom 404 error page to redirect users.
Get A New Website Design Today
There are a handful of more minor actions to take after launching your site so you can maintain SEO value. If you want to refresh your website and learn more about this process, our web designers and SEO team at Boston Web Marketing can handle everything.
If applicable, we will look at your current website and build mockups based on your old site and what you’d like to see on the new site. Our SEO team will ensure that your site retains its current SEO value and that everything is transferred.