Why consider SEO in a redesign?
Your company is redoing its website and you’re in charge. Pretty exciting, right?
There are many reasons to redesign your website, from improving its usability to undergoing a major rebrand. SEO is important to any business that operates online, but many don’t realize that search engine optimization needs to be built into the web design process, not added in later.
Because website redesigns carry a significant level of risk to existing organic rankings and revenue.
Let’s say your site’s doing great. Rankings are strong, organic traffic is flowing, and revenue is growing. Redesigning a website or migrating to a new CMS takes a lot of planning and hard work. You are super excited about the new site redesign and everybody is happy with all the PowerPoints they see.
When done wrong, a redesign can be disastrous.
Organic traffic dropped … and pretty much stayed there. The excitement for the new website turns into panic.
Do you want to undo all that hard work on your website’s SEO?
If you lose most of your rankings and traffic, you’ll see fewer leads and fewer sales.
Avoiding SEO Disaster During a Redesign or Migration
But there are ways to update your website without destroying your SEO results.
The whole situation could have been easily avoided with some simple planning and consideration for existing organic traffic.
Things that typically can change or be problematic during a redesign include:
• Content can be removed.
• Content can be changed.
• Content may move within the site’s hierarchy.
• URLs may change.
• Page-level optimization may change.
• New content can be added.
• New sections can be added to the site.
• New technology or features may be used.
• New technical issues can be introduced.
• Internal link structure could change.
• Domain name may chance.
• Failure to implement redirects.
• Protocol may change.
The biggest website re-design SEO issues usually come from a switch in the content management system being used — especially on larger-scale sites. Often there is a completely different URL structure, with hundreds or thousands of pages.
There could also be issues when there are several changes made at once: new domain name, new CMS, different URL structures, plenty of content changes, switching from HTTP to HTTPS, etc. Each change introduces a new variable and something else to be managed (and potentially messed up).
By thinking strategically, you can take the opportunity to improve a site’s performance after a redesign.
The key components to maintaining your rankings and SEO during a site redesign are:
- Identify what works currently with your SEO. Keywords and topics that rank, pages that bring in organic traffic and so on;
- Find out your website’s SEO weaknesses, to identify areas to make improvements on the new site;
- Take into consideration common issues that crop up with a redesign;
- Prepare a detailed plan of what will change on the new site.
- Review the goals for the new site: to preserve the existing rankings and traffic; to improve the rankings and traffic. Reflect them in a complete sitemap for the new site.
- Compare this sitemap against the existing site and create mappings for URL moves.
Website Redesign Checklist to Update Your Website Without Destroying SEO
Here at WorkMatix, we take some specific steps before migration, during launch, and post-launch to mitigate risk and avoid SEO disaster when redesigning your website.
The Website Redesign SEO Checklist @WorkMatix looks like:
- Establish an SEO baseline to compare to after launch
Conduct a thorough SEO audit of the original site before you start working on a new design.
Identify structure problems that could be stopping you from going even higher in the results.
- Define goals & create a project plan
- Strategize the information architecture
Make sure your information architecture will accommodate your long-term business goals.
If you think that you’re going to add new categories in the future, we will ensure that you have a configuration that will organize everything properly.
- Preserve the inbound link inventory
- Maintain identified optimized content
- Create a 301-redirect strategy & plan
- Optimize all new content for search
- Optimize imagery & videos
- Check SEO implementation on dev version
- Check test site metadata on live URLs
- Run a preliminary launch audit
- Go-live check
- Run launch architecture audit
- Dev-to-live audit
- Code & performance validation
- Conduct post-launch quality control check
- Post-launch monitoring: measure the performance of the new site and benchmark new metrics – for comparison with the pre-launch.
For the next 1-2 months, monitor Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to watch for reported 404 errors, crawl errors, and any HTML on-page issues detected. From here the ongoing search optimization plan can be resumed.
We follow these best practices to make the process of re-design painless for our clients.
If you involve our SEO team from the very start of the redesign planning process and stick to the checklist above, you will stand a great chance of minimizing the initial effects of the redesign and improving your website’s SEO rankings in the longer term. Everything on this page is one stage of a longer sequence. The full Website Redesign SEO & AI Search Readiness Roadmap lays out all of it in order, from the decision to rebuild through to post-launch verification.
Protect yourself by retaining an outside SEO professional with enough knowledge to be your advocate. Make no mistake – you need an SEO advocate if your web design firm doesn’t have an SEO specialist in house.
I am now my client’s SEO advocate.
If you need an SEO advocate, reach out to me. I’ll be happy to schedule a one hour consultation with you to review your website development project.
If needed, I’ll help you navigate through the necessary SEO features of your new WordPress website. I’ll also be happy to work along side your web development firm to make sure your new website is optimized. Search Engine Optimization is not a one-time thing. When the monitoring phase is in motion, you can go back to your original plan and goals and measure the performance of the new site.
Learn more about our Website Redesign SEO Toolkit for AI Search which is a 13-workbook system designed to overhaul a B2B website without losing organic rankings. Google’s own guidance on site moves with URL changes sets out the sequence, and the order it gives is the order that decides whether traffic survives.
