Revamp Website Without Losing SEO Ranking

In this digitally advancing time where technologies and trends are evolving quickly, and digital presence is of utmost priority, adapting one’s business according to one’s customer is vital. Since people’s taste is also evolving in sync with digitization, the lifespan of your website is short-lived. As user preferences keep changing, redesigning websites is the key to staying relevant. However, people’s first thought about revamping their website is, “Is it possible to redesign a website without losing SEO?”

Because of the fear of losing their organic traffic and search engine ranking, site owners are reluctant to update their website design to make it current and relevant. While that’s a valid concern, the good news is you can revamp your website without sacrificing your hard-earned SEO benefits. In fact, a well-executed redesign can enhance your search engine optimization. In this blog post, we’ll guide you through the steps to redesign your website and keep your SEO ranking intact.

Significance of SEO for Website Redesign

The end goal of a website is to have a robust online presence, ultimately leading to an increase in profit. With that in mind, website redesign is done to make the site more suitable and appealing for the target audience and increase sales. But the most important factor that plays a hand in increasing visibility and sales is how SEO-friendly the site is. It is a crucial part of the optimization phase that should be noticed because it plays a pivotal role in determining how your website performs in search engine results and, consequently, the boost in organic visitors.

Here’s why SEO is of paramount importance for website redesign:

Preserving SEO Equity

If your current website has been around for some time, it has likely accumulated SEO equity. It includes high search engine rankings, quality backlinks, and established keyword positions. Maintaining this equity is vital during a redesign to avoid losing valuable organic traffic. A poorly executed redesign can lead to a significant drop in rankings, affecting your online visibility.

Competing in the Online Landscape

The online platform is saturated with similar businesses fighting for consumers’ attention. Competing effectively in today’s digital world requires staying updated with SEO best practices. A website redesign allows you to incorporate the latest SEO techniques and strategies, ensuring you remain competitive in search engine rankings.

User Experience and SEO

The thought for redesigning a website stems from the drive to enhance the user experience, be it by a few minor design tweaks, improving site speed, navigation, or the overall design of the entire website. Not just for the users, these factors are equally important contributors to boosting the SEO of the site. Search engines always give a lot of importance to user experience and the site’s ability to provide its users with the best results. So, redesigning the website to boost the user experience will, in turn, reward you with a high SEO ranking.

Mobile Responsiveness

Today, mobile devices dominate internet usage, and most internet users use their smartphones to look for things online. So, ensuring your website is mobile-responsive is critical. Search engines give preference to mobile-friendly websites. A well-planned redesign can incorporate responsive design, ensuring your site is easily accessible on smartphones and tablets and boosting your SEO.

Technical SEO Improvements

Website redesigns present an opportunity to address technical SEO issues accumulated over time. It includes optimizing site speed, fixing broken links, and ensuring proper header tag usage. Resolving these issues can positively impact SEO by improving your site’s crawlability and indexability.

Content Strategy Enhancement

Redesigns often involve updating and reorganizing content. This is a great chance to refine your content strategy, ensuring you target the right keywords and provide valuable, up-to-date information. A well-crafted content strategy aligned with SEO best practices can significantly enhance your website’s search engine visibility.

Things To Consider To Redesign a Website Without Losing SEO

When you redesign your website to enhance its usability and appeal without compromising on SEO, you’ll attract and retain potential customers and encourage them to make the desired conversion. So, what are the things you must consider to ensure that the SEO health of your website is intact all through the revamp work? Let’s look at the site redesign SEO checklist you must follow during the design transition.

Backup of Your Website

As the saying goes, precaution is better than cure, so start by creating a backup of your site before jumping into the redesign. The backup should have the theme files, plugins, database, and contents so you can switch back to your previous design in case of mishaps.

Add a “Site Under Maintenance” Page

When you start your website redesign, you want the visitor to avoid clicking on your site and seeing a broken page, which can leave a negative impression on them. The best thing you can do is switch your website to maintenance mode when your redesigning project lasts. You can easily create a maintenance mode page on your website building platform, select the template, and turn it on and off with a single click.

Check Your Current SEO Status

The next crucial step is to evaluate the SEO health of your website- meaning, collect the ranking of your website and individual page ranks, keyword rankings, evaluate how your content is performing, design elements fueling the conversion, and more. You can do this via Google Analytics and Search Console tracking tool and export the necessary data. Once you’ve relaunched your website with a new design, this data will be your bouncing board.

Maintain The Site Structure

Another important thing you must consider is the structure and content of your site. Site structure is the flow or hierarchy of your site and the URL structure. Since site structure and URLs are essential for SEO, you should not delete or add any new pages and keep the same URL as your previous design version. However, if it is a design requirement to make changes on the site pages, you must add the 301 redirects following the SEO practice.

Run The Redesign On a Test Site

This is a step that you must pay attention to and take at all costs. When you redesign your website, you do it on a staging server. It makes it easy to run, test, and audit your site to check for its functionality. Doing so lets you detect errors and bugs beforehand and resolve them before making your new site live.

Check Your Robots.txt and Meta Robots

Incorporating a direct reference to the updated sitemap of your website within the robots.txt file can significantly streamline the crawling and indexing process for search engines. It’s crucial to ensure you’re doing something other than hindering the indexing of vital pages. Conversely, if there are specific landing pages that you wish to exclude from indexing, this is the ideal time to verify these selections. Furthermore, if your website features canonical links for closely related pages, confirming that they are functioning as intended is essential.

Post Launch Audit

Once you’ve launched your website, the work there still needs to be completed. Although you’ve checked for errors on the test site, you must do the audit post launching your site to double-check and make your revamped website error-free and operating at its optimal potential. It ensures that your site is launched, optimized, secure, user-friendly, and ready to perform at its best. It’s the key to making a lasting positive impression on your audience and search engines alike.

Conclusion

Redesigning a website is not just about playing with the color or placing a new icon. It’s a strategic decision to inspire conversion and sales that requires proper planning and execution. The most crucial element to make your website redesign successful is to optimize your site for search engines. You can’t redesign your website and ignore the SEO of your site. If you want a site to succeed and make your target audience into paying customers, then website design and SEO should go hand in hand.

If you’re looking to update your website and want the right website redesign SEO strategy, then Splendour Group is here to help. We’ll provide a tailored web design and SEO solution that aligns with your business goal and enables you to attain your business objectives. Collaborate with us and achieve your desired success in this competitive digital landscape.