No matter how useful your product or service is, an outdated website design can ruin your business. That's because websites create the first impression and if they fail to gain people's trust, they won't convert. Therefore, staying up to date with the latest website design trends is crucial to staying ahead of the competition.
However, site owners often hesitate to redesign their websites for fear that it will affect their SEO rankings and organic traffic. And the fear is not entirely insignificant given the fact that a website redesign can lead to the following: change and removal of existing content, domain and subdomain can change, page-level optimization can be modified , new technical problems may arise, new content may be added, the internal link structure may change, and so on.
All of these have the potential to affect your SEO rankings, but with the right strategies, you can maintain a balance between the two. Yeah, can redesign your website without losing organic traffic or SEO rankings. As? This blog will explore it all. Stay until the end.
How to Retain SEO Ranking After Website Redesign
1. Run an SEO audit
Before you start redesigning your website, perform an SEO audit. It will help you analyze top-ranking keywords (use them even after redesigning the site), low-performing keywords (you can sacrifice them), pages that receive the most traffic (try not to mess with these!), etc..
Depending on the ideas, you should take the next step. Adopt on-page optimization best practices as you redesign your website.
2. Don't focus only on aesthetics
We agree to improve the aesthetic appeal at the heart of the website redesign. But it shouldn't be you unique worry. Examine your website from an SEO perspective. For example, you must adhere to on-page SEO practices to ensure your site aligns with search engine demands.
From keyword research to updating content, optimizing meta titles and descriptions, improving loading speed, including image alt text, and optimizing title tags – there's a lot of work to do. Here is a complete guide to learn more about on-page SEO best practices.
There are several agencies that offer website development services and SEO services. Try to involve such a company as they will be aware of both and can optimize your website along with the redesign.
3. Don't play with URLs
Avoid making drastic changes to the site's domain. If you change the domain, the entire system will be affected, which, in turn, can cause your search engine optimization efforts to collapse. Therefore, continue to use existing URLs as much as possible.
Especially, keep URLs with high ranking and traffic flow as they are. If some pages have low rankings or nominal traffic, you can update their URLs and make them more SEO friendly. Also, if you want to add new pages, you are free to select any URL for them. That way, it won't affect the rankings.
4. Check internal links
Internal linking helps get the link juice flowing. That means that if you link a low-ranking page to a high-ranking page, the former will receive a boost from the latter's link and therefore improve its ranking. As you can understand, you can adopt this practice for newly added web pages.
Since these pages don't have any rankings yet, they will benefit from the link juice flowing from high-ranking pages. Yet another tip is not to make the website architecture too deep. It will take people from page to page and frustrate them. It will create a bad user experience and delay conversion. Additionally, search engines will consider these pages to be too difficult to find and therefore may not show them in high positions.
5. Set up 301 and 302 redirects
Sometimes it is necessary to redirect old URLs to new ones (although you should keep this practice to a minimum). If you plan to make major changes to your permalink structure, it's important to have a spreadsheet of all relevant redirects. Once the site is up, crawl the list of URLs to make sure each redirect works as desired.
This is where 301 and 302 redirects come into play. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from the old page to the new one. It is sometimes preferred over temporary redirects as it transfers incoming links to the new page.
If you want to set up a temporary redirect, a 302 redirect is the way to go. You can configure it while refreshing a web page to ensure a seamless user experience. However, it is best not to use too many temporary redirects as they hurt SEO.
6. Keep high-quality content
If your website has a dedicated blog section full of high-quality, keyword-optimized blogs, don't miss them at all costs. You can update these blogs with the latest information. Preserve video and image SEO practices to boost your SEO efforts. Additionally, when transferring these assets to the new site, be careful to keep all file names and metadata intact.
7. Monitor Ranking and Organic Traffic
Once the new site is live, it's time to monitor rankings and organic traffic. Some fluctuations are expected during the initial phase, but it will stabilize soon. Now is the time to boost your efforts with more high-quality content and a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. You can connect with a top SEO agency to improve your search engine rankings and organic traffic.
Following these tips will help you preserve and even improve SEO rankings even after redesigning your website. You no longer have to delay website redesign for fear that it will affect your SEO efforts. So, what are you waiting for! Give them a try and let us know how they translate for you.
