Website redesign, is it an opportunity to improve SEO or an invitation for disaster – especially after you have worked so hard to build up an SEO equity over the years. Don’t get me wrong, a new design for your website is refreshing for your customers, but it is also essential that you ensure that you take the right steps to retain and improve the existing Search Engine Optimization for rankings and traffic.

There are three main components to take care of while you redesign your website:

1. A clear understanding of what currently works for SEO

It is essential that you stay on top of things and understand what works and what does not work currently in SEO. Make a list of keywords and the topics that rank. Also analyse your site for the pages that bring the most organic traffic. Knowing all this will tell you exactly what intelligence needs to be fed to the new site that you are designing.

2. Knowledge of the issues that may crop up from an SEO perspective while you redesign

There are a number of issues that may come to light during a redesign. There may be content that you remove, or content that may be placed differently. Some of the URLs may change. New features or new sections may be added to the site. Well, sometimes even domain name or sub domains may change. All of these issues need to be accounted for as they directly impact your rankings and organic traffic. For example, if the content as well as the design changes, it gets harder later on to diagnose the root cause of some of the SEO issues.

3. A detailed plan of what will change on the new site

It is hence essential to make a list of all the anticipated changes that will be required during redesign. Your ultimate goal should be to preserve the SEO rankings and traffic as well as try to improve it.

Identify the areas of the site that you can actually make improvements to during the redesign. With a little planning, you can definitely avoid a redesign disaster!

Here are some of the best practices for a trouble free website redesign:

• If possible, it’s a good idea to keep the old site live on a temporary web address. Make sure that the site can be crawled too.
• It’s also good to save the crawl of the old site.
• Don’t fix what is not broken! URLs in particular, if you can keep them the same, there is less that could go wrong.
• Redirecting the URLs should be the very first priority on your list during a redesign.
• Minimize changes to the content that is already performing well online.
• Crawling your old site will allow you to export the data such as page titles, meta descriptions and headers etc.
• Update backlinks this will ensure that your new site is indexed and ranked quickly.

Website redesign should be taken as an opportunity to improve SEO and organic traffic. Plan your redesign accordingly.

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