Design trends are constantly changing and if you are trying to stay competitive in your industry, you’ll eventually need to redesign your website.
For most sites, it’s best to overhaul your entire website every few years rather than “Frankenstein” something together with small revisions here and there.
But there’s often hesitation about opting for the redesign, stemming from the question: will my site lose its SEO keyword rankings in the process?
How to Preserve Website’s SEO Rankings During a Redesign:
Maintain The Website URL Structure
When redesigning a website, it’s best to retain all existing website URLs, especially on pages that are ranking organically. Retaining the URL structure means that the web design team will upgrade the design and content of the page, but the website address (URL) will stay the same.
Changing the website address of a page for no reason isn’t ideal for users nor search engines. If you’ve spent time building up links and rankings for that page, changing the URL runs the risk of losing the SEO value of that page.
Be Careful With 301 Redirects
At some point in the lifetime of your site, you’ll need to delete a page or change its address. When you do this, it’s critical that you set up a proper 301 redirect. Redirection means that you are permanently redirecting the original URL to another live page on your website.
If you don’t set up these redirects properly, both visitors and search engines will receive a 404 error, stating that the page cannot be found.
Having a lot of 404 errors on your website will negatively impact both your SEO keyword rankings and the user experience. If a search engine hits a 404 error while it’s crawling a site, it stops the crawler from continuing to index other pages. This can then cause indexing errors across the site.
Improve Your Web Content
A site redesign often leads to reviewing and improving the content — and rightly so! Most businesses forget to check Google ranking update outside of a web project.
If that’s been the case for you, your site probably contains outdated descriptions of your services and products. However, keep in mind that the content on the page needs to contain certain cues for the search engines.
If you have pages with proper SEO ranking factors for a specific keyword, avoid drastically changing the content or deleting a lot of critical headlines. The H1 and H2 tags on a web page are the most important headings for on-page SEO.
An H1 is an HTML tag that indicates the heading of the web page. You most likely want to retain the H1 and H2 for high-ranking pages.
Get Assistance With The Website Launch
Launching a new business website requires several technical steps and if you don’t know what you are doing, you could mistakenly cause downtime or dreaded errors. These errors, in turn, can cause major SEO problems.
Typically, it’s best for a skilled web developer from a renowned web development agency to handle the launch and to guide you through the process.
Closely Monitor The Site Post-Launch
For the first couple of months after launching a redesign, it’s all about monitoring. There are some website issues that are very difficult to detect before launch, even with the best quality control process.
The first place to start is Google Search Console, a free service that automatically detects indexing errors, mobile functionality errors, and crawl errors for your site.
Since Google ranking update most important, fixing errors related to Google’s indexing is paramount.
By following a few best practices for SEO, web design and development company, you can retain your rankings and benefit from a new site.
Have queries? Feel free to get in touch with us!
Summary
The best way to keep your site in the game is to keep your rankings up and boost your domain authority.