Approaching a website redesign is like walking on thin ice. Sure, you could improve your site's aesthetic appeal, conversion rate, and user experience, but if it isn't done correctly, it can spell disaster for your search engine rankings and overall traffic.
This article discusses how to redesign a website without sacrificing your SEO.
Strategy #1: Build an SEO Plan
Find an SEO expert. Whether it's someone on your team, a consultant, or hiring a third-party vendor, having someone that can help you build your plan can give you a headstart on maximizing your success.
An expert can provide you with a list of keywords and phrases to include in your site metadata and to help optimize your site's content.
Strategy #2: Take Stock in Your Current Site
Before updating your website, measure the performance of your current one. Check where you rank for important search terms and analyze KPIs such as metrics and other indicators.
You'll want to look at:
- High-traffic pages
- Bounce rate
- Domain authority
- Time on site
- Form submissions
- Unique visitors
- And anything else that seems relevant
Create a spreadsheet to help you determine what's currently working and what's not.
Strategy #3: Optimize Your Current Content
To optimize your site well, you should use every page to target one or two essential keywords for your business. Your goal is to make your content contain things that users are actually searching for.
Here are some areas to optimize throughout your new site:
- Titles and headings
- Paragraphs and body copy
- URLs
- Meta descriptions
- Image alt tags
- Blog content
Add links related to the content you are posting to increase your website's ranking. This helps search engine bots discover and index more of your web pages and allows readers to easily navigate and understand the connection between various posts on your site.
Strategy #4: Use 301 Redirects
As you review your website content, you'll come across some pages that don't bring value to your business. They could be irrelevant, obsolete, or redundant. In addition, they're likely generating insignificant qualified traffic flow. To make the most of your crawl budget, it's better to delete these pages or redirect them elsewhere - a process aptly named "content pruning."
You'll want to create redirects for pages with backlinks for lower-ranking content. Furthermore, any time you change your URL structure, a redirection should be set up for existing links to point them in the right direction. However, if neither of these criteria is met on a page, it can safely be archived without worry.
Strategy #5: Optimize Your Page Speed
People these days expect pages to load quickly. Almost half of the consumers anticipate webpages to render within two seconds or less! Not only is speed essential for enhancing user experience, but it likewise plays an integral role in search ranking.
To optimize page load times, compress your files, add a content distribution network (CDN), simplify and shorten your code, and use a cache plugin on your site.
Redesigning a website can be intimidating, but it doesn't have to come at the cost of your SEO. With careful planning and implementation, you can improve both user experience and search engine rankings.