How To Maintain SEO During Website Redesign?

No matter how useful your product or service is, an outdated website design can destroy your business. After all, websites create first impressions and if they fail to gain people’s trust, they will not convert. It’s crucial to keep up with the latest trends in website design to stay ahead of the competition. However, many website owners are often hesitant to redesign their website because they fear it will affect their SEO rankings and organic traffic.

SEO during website redesign

Run an SEO audit

Before starting a website redesign, do an SEO audit. It will help you analyze top keywords use them even after website redesign, low-performing keywords you can sacrifice them, pages that get the most traffic try not to waste them etc. Adopt on-page optimization best practices when rebuilding your site.

Don’t just focus on aesthetics

Improving the aesthetic appearance is the basis of a website redesign, we agree. You should follow on-page SEO practices to ensure your website meets search engine requirements. From keyword research to updating content, optimizing meta titles and descriptions, to improving load speed, including image alt text, to optimizing caption tags, there is a lot of work to be done.

Don’t play with URLs

Avoid making any drastic changes to the site’s domain. If you change the domain, the entire system will be affected, which can lead to the collapse of your search engine optimization efforts. If some pages have low rankings or nominal traffic, you can update their URLs to make them more SEO friendly. If you want to add new pages, you can choose any URL for them.

Check the internal connections

The inner link helps with the fluidity of the link. If you link a low-ranking site to a high-ranking site, the former will receive link juice from the latter, increasing the rake. As you know, you can use this procedure for newly added websites. Since these sites have no rankings yet, they will benefit from the link juice flowing from highly ranked sites. Another tip is to not make the site architecture too deep. It moves people from one page to another and frustrates them.

Set up 301 and 302 redirects

Redirecting old URLs to new ones is occasionally necessary although you should keep this practice to a minimum. If you plan to make any major changes to your permalink structure, it’s important to have a table of all relevant redirects. Once the site is live, review the list of URLs and make sure each redirect is working as planned. You can set it when you update your website to ensure a smooth user experience.

Maintain high quality content

If your website has a dedicated blog section full of quality keyword-optimized blogs, don’t lose them at any cost. You can update these blogs with the latest information. Maintain video and image SEO practices to boost your SEO efforts. Also, be sure to keep all filenames and metadata intact when transferring these assets to a new site.

Track rankings and organic traffic

Once the new site is up and running, it’s time to track rankings and organic traffic. Some fluctuations are expected in the initial phase, but they will settle down soon. Now is the time to boost your efforts with better content and a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. You can partner with a top SEO agency to improve your search engine rankings and organic traffic.

Conclusion

Following these tips will help you maintain and even improve your SEO ranking even after redesigning your website. No longer do you have to delay a website redesign because you’re worried it will affect your SEO efforts.