Redesigning your website seems to be an exciting task, but it is challenging at the same time. While the focus is naturally on aesthetics and user experience, neglecting search engine optimization during this process can result in a significant fall in visibility and organic traffic.
SEO should never be treated as an afterthought during your website redesign. In fact, it should be an integral part of every stage of a redesign, ensuring that your newly revamped website not only looks good but also performs exceptionally well in search engine results.
In this article, you will explore various strategies that will help you implement SEO while revamping your website design.
Implementing SEO During Website Redesign: How to Do It?
Here are some steps you need to follow while implementing SEO during the redesign process of your website, as given below:
Phase 1: Pre-Redesign SEO Audit and Data Collection
Before beginning the rework of your website design, you need to conduct a thorough audit of the SEO campaign of your existing website. This audit will help you understand your current performance and recognize areas of improvement. Essential steps include:
- Traffic Analysis: Utilize Google Analytics to understand your current organic traffic, top-performing pages, conversion rates, and user behaviour. You need to identify pages that bring in significant traffic or conversions and prioritize their SEO preservation.
- Keyword Research: Consider re-evaluating your target keywords. Are they still relevant? Are there new opportunities? You should use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMRush to recognize high-volume, relevant keywords that align with your business goals and the content of your new site.
- Backlink Profile Analysis: You should understand your current backlink profile using tools like Google Search Console or Ahrefs. Identify valuable backlinks and ensure they are preserved during the redesign. Broken backlinks will definitely cause significant harm to your SEO.
- Technical SEO Audit: Recognize any existing technical issues such as crawl errors, broken links, duplicate content, slow page speed, or improper canonicalization. These issues need to be addressed in the new design.
- Content Audit: Review all existing content for relevance, quality, and performance. Decide what content to keep, update, consolidate, or remove. You should also identify content gaps that can be filled on the new site.
- Current Site: You need to document your current rankings for key keywords. This will serve as a benchmark to measure the success of your SEO efforts after the redesign process ends.
Phase 2: SEO During the Design and Development Process
This is the phase where proactive implementation of SEO is truly required. Every design and development decision should be made considering the impact it may have on your SEO efforts.
- Information Architecture and URL Structure: A logical and intuitive site structure is necessary for both user experience and SEO. You need to plan a clear hierarchy of pages, with relevant categories and subcategories. Keep URLs short, descriptive, and keyword-rich. Avoid dynamic URLs with unnecessary parameters. If possible, maintain existing URL structures for high-performing pages to avoid 404 errors.
- Content Strategy and Optimization: You should integrate your updated keyword research into your content strategy. Ensure each page has a unique and clear purpose and targets particular keywords. Optimize title tags (H1, H2, etc.) and image alt text with relevant keywords. Focus on creating high-quality, valuable, and engaging content that naturally incorporates keywords.
- Mobile-First Design and Responsiveness: Google prioritizes mobile-first indexing, due to which your website needs to be fully responsive and provide an exceptional user experience across all devices. Test thoroughly on different screen sizes.
- Page Speed Optimization: Website speed is the most important ranking factor. To ensure faster loading speeds, you need to work with your developers to optimize images, utilize browser caching, minifying CSS and JavaScript, and utilize a Content Delivery Network to ensure fast loading times.
- Internal Linking Strategy: You need to plan a robust internal linking structure that guides users and search engine crawlers through your site. Link relevant pages together using descriptive anchor text. This will be helpful in the distribution of “link juice” and improvement in crawlability.
- Schema Markup Implementation: You should implement structured data, i.e. Schema Markup, which will help search engines understand your content in a better manner. This will help you gain a place in rich snippets in search results, thus improving your click-through rates.
- XML Sitemap and Robots.txt: You need to ensure that your website has a correctly configured XML sitemap that lists all crawlable pages and a robots.txt file that will direct search engine crawlers in an appropriate manner.
After these two phases, there will be checks in SEO performance before and after the launch of the newly redesigned website. This involves thorough testing, implementation of 301 redirects, setup of Google Analytics and Search Console, submission of a new XML sitemap, monitoring and adjustment, etc.
To Summarize
A website redesign is a unique opportunity to refresh the online presence of your brand. It is also a great way to boost its search engine visibility at a significant rate. By integrating SEO at every stage, you will be able to ensure that your website is not just aesthetically pleasing, but is also generating traffic.
Featured image designed by Freepik.