Website Redesign While Maintaining SEO in Ten Steps

Everything needs a makeover over time. Redesigning or making over adds to the increased efficiency and gives a new look. If you are owning a website, it could be time for a redesign if your website isn’t operating at its full capacity or its traffic is declining. While doing a website redesign, it is necessary to maintain the SEO. Redesigns can be pricey, but it is preferable to losing money on an ineffective website year after year. It’s critical to avoid the traps that can seriously harm your SEO when rebuilding your website. Below is an SEO checklist for website redesign while maintaining SEO in ten steps to assist you, but before that, we will learn about website redesign.

What Is a Website Redesign?

A website redesign entails significant adjustments to your website. During a redesign, significant changes to your HTML code, content, structure, and graphics may occur, giving it a whole new appearance.

This is a normal—and significant—part of the growth of a website. Up to 50% of consumers think a company’s brand is reflected in part by the way its website is designed. If you hadn’t made any significant modifications to your website, it would look terribly out of place now, even if you had the best website in the world in 2001. Your website needs to be altered to stay up to date with changes in design best practices, technology, and expectations from your target audience.

Accessibility is a significant factor. 38 percent of visitors who are visiting a website for the first time scan the page for navigational links or page layout.

On occasion, you’ll need to make more substantial changes in the form of a complete website redesign. Sometimes, this will entail making smaller changes as part of a website refresh. In either case, you must ensure that you are adhering to current best practices to prevent your website redesign from affecting your SEO.

Benefits of a Website Redesign

Redesigning a website carries some risk, particularly in terms of SEO, but when done effectively, there are substantial benefits. Redesigning your website can:

• Enhance site performance and SEO

• streamlining user interaction

• Reorient your content strategy.

• Revamp your website

• Provide faster loading times.

• Deliver up to date security.

The most obvious advantage is that you want to make your website beautiful because it acts as a modern-day store offering different products and services. A physical store will have trouble attracting customers if it has a broken sign, subpar lighting, and a dark interior. The same is true for websites; if they appear old-dated and worn-out, visitors may conclude that your company is similarly outdated and worn-out.

Redesigning a website ensures more than just cosmetic changes. Additionally, it gives you a chance to alter your website’s essential layout so that users may traverse it more easily. Since even a straightforward redesign with fundamental functionality might take an average of one month to accomplish, you want to get off to the right start.

Businesses develop with time, and their websites naturally expand and alter, which might result in a disorganized website structure. You change the parent and child pages, add new content categories, rearrange the items in your navigation bar, and so on.

When it comes to design and UX, the simple rule is that intricate design is almost never good. You want to make it as easy as you can for visitors to navigate your site—as well as search engine robots—to browse and locate what they’re looking for. A website redesign is an excellent chance to accomplish this. This is the perfect moment to assess your website, set your goals, and develop a strategy for redesigning it to help you achieve them. Colour Moon, being the undisputed leader in the web development sector, offers website redesigning while maintaining SEO. If you are looking to redesign your website according to the latest standards, Colour Moon offers website revamping services at an affordable cost while maintaining SEO.

When Are Website Redesigns Necessary?

The following are the main justifications for a website overhaul, as per a 2020 survey:

• Low rates of conversion (80.8 percent).

• Elevated bounce rates (65 percent)

• It needs improved UX (61 percent).

• Not responsive across all platforms (53.8 percent).

• Obsolete website (38.5 percent)

• Not suited to SEO (23.1 percent)

Determining whether a website redesign is required can be challenging. You’re probably investing a sizable sum of money on your makeover, so you want to make sure the timing is ideal. It’s important to keep in mind that user experience is crucial to digital marketing. It will be evident in practically all metrics, and it will ultimately have an effect on your bottom line.

The conversion rate is the metric that most website owners care about. This may be a clear indication that it’s time to rebuild the website. Conversion rates vary, but if yours is declining, it might be time to think about redesigning your website. Additionally, they vary based on your industry. For instance, your conversion rates will be around 7% if your website is in the real estate or home improvement sectors. It might be closer to 18% if you work in the media and entertainment sector, though.

Utilizing your website from the perspective of your visitors is one of the best ways to determine whether it’s time to make improvements to it. Asking yourself these straightforward questions can help you visualize visiting your website for the very first time.

• Is the branding effective?

• How quick do pages load?

• Is your website organized logically and simple to use?

• Are your pages mobile-friendly?

• Do you have trouble finding the information you need?

• Do you have a simplified enough client journey?

See how you fare by contrasting your website with those of your rivals. A website refresh can be the solution if you discover that your site excels in some areas but falls short in others. On the other hand, if there are numerous obstacles in your way, it’s likely time for a complete website redesign.

Website Redesign While Maintaining SEO in Ten Steps

SEO is a constant process of optimization that is always focused on the most recent Google algorithm changes; it is not a quick fix. This is something that website owners who are thinking about redesigning their website should be aware of.

Errors frequently appear as a result of frequent modifications to the HTML code and the individual pages, which is bad for the website’s search engine optimization. On the other hand, the appropriate actions taken during website redesign might improve a page’s SEO-relevant elements. Let us discuss Website Redesign While Maintaining SEO in Ten Steps. To know why each and every business small or big needs a website redesign without losing SEO.

A step-by-step guide to website redesign that is SEO-friendly. Below is a guide to Website Redesign While Maintaining SEO in Ten Steps :

1. Well-defined Redesigning Goals

Without well-stated redesigning goals, you risk putting a lot of work on something without getting the required results. You must have certain objectives established, just like with any SEO task.

Establish sensible objectives that are Time-bound, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, and Relevant. Set relevant KPIs and targets for the redesign. Increased conversions, increased organic traffic, leads, and unique visitors. Maintaining your present position for some of your target keywords while also ranking for some of the new ones you’ve concentrated on for your website makeover should be one of your goals.

Your goals should be based on the following considerations for Website Redesign While Maintaining SEO in Ten Steps:

• Will the redesign assist you expand your pool of prospective customers?

• Will it enable you to connect with a new target audience segment that your previous website was unable to reach?

There should be many sub-goals for the website redesign that will help you achieve your overall objective of establishing yourself as an industry leader, such as producing authoritative content, connecting with your target audience through various channels, etc. This includes taking care of the E-A-T portion of your site’s SEO overhaul.

If Google rankings are important to you, improving user experience should be the main goal of your website redesign. Google has made it obvious what constitutes a good google page experience and how a website may offer it. Your idea for the redesign should be based on a set of precise objectives, an overarching plan to attain those objectives, and a specific plan.

2. Research

Your research topics will depend on your objectives, but generally speaking, you’ll need to look into your competitors and Audience.

• Competitors: to observe what your peers and leaders in the market are doing successfully and include these elements into your makeover.

• Audience: Your target audience and whether or not they will like your “refreshed” website.

Your research will probably be both generative and evaluative in nature from the viewpoint of user-friendliness and UX.

• Generative research: This is primarily unstructured and requires user interviews, feedback analysis to glean insights, and observation of how your target market interacts with rival companies. Its objective is to ascertain what and how your target audience wants from you.

• Evaluative Research: The term “evaluative” may hint at the “quantitative” character of the research, which may include A/B and Tree testing, among other things.

3. Audience

Your initial website, no matter how well-made it was, would not have successfully targeted your intended audience. After the website goes up and the company starts to take off, many business owners find out about their alleged target market.

The appeal of website redesign is that it gives you the chance to put this knowledge to use and utilize it to add a new target audience segment, go after an untapped target audience, and increase the size of your current customer bases by appealing to a larger demographic.

The difference between redesigning a website and rebranding your business, however, must be carefully considered. If the latter is not your intention, the redesign shouldn’t have that unwanted effect because it can result in a reduction in the size of your initial customer base.

4. Rankings & Google Updates

Your website may need to be redesigned because it isn’t performing as well on SERPs as it could. And content isn’t necessarily the issue. You must take into account a wide range of technical SEO features and SEO ranking variables in order to succeed.

There is almost never a better time to redesign a website in order to gain significant SEO points with Google by emphasizing:

• Google’s regular modifications to its algorithms and ranking variables. Like when Core Web Vitals was added as a ranking factor in the page experience update.

• Adapt your website to current trends like voice-based searches.

• To engage your website’s users, think about including conversational AI into the redesign.

Anything that would make your website whole and your content more helpful, accessible, and credible for your visitors will likely endear you to Google. So strive to meet the evolving expectations of your target audience.

5. Keyword Research And Mapping

You should update your map and do research on the additional keywords you are aiming to rank for, even if you already have one for your primary website and have done your research and developed content (some of which is already ranked).

For that you should:

• Include new keywords based on the additional services or goods you are now offering that weren’t previously included on the website.

• Increase the volume of visits to your website and to increase its authority, try ranking for some authoritative but less competitive topics or keywords (ultimately domain authority).

• Investigate keywords and keyword variants that may see a reasonable number of searches but not enough relevant, high-quality content to satisfy them.

6. Analyze & Benchmark Current Site

Cleaning your storage space is analogous to analyzing and inspecting your current website. Choose what to keep and what to discard.

The actions you might want to take are listed below:

• Compare your existing website to others, noting metrics like bounce rate, time spent on site, and unique visitor count. Analyze trends in visitor numbers and sales conversions (over a specified period and seasonal fluctuations). Google Analytics can be used to accomplish that (GA).

• Check the website’s search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, rankings, click-through rate, top web pages for organic traffic, etc. Utilizing Google Search Console, you may achieve that (GSC).

• Utilize a crawler such as Screaming Frog or Site Bulb to crawl your present website. Save the crawl data so you can later compare it to the crawl data after the redesign is finished.

• Check the number of indexed web pages. You can check the Google Search Console Coverage report or use the site: query.

• Check for consistency issues and issues like duplicate or missing page titles, pages that return error codes, titles and descriptions that are not optimized, etc.

7. Find High-Ranking and Low-Performing Content

Discover the search terms for which your present website is performing well. Choose which web pages on your website to keep and which to prune after identifying the best- and worst-performing ones.

Here are some pointers to consider:

• Keep the content and URL that are already performing well for specific keywords.
• If the material is a useful resource with many inbound links, you should preserve it even if its rating isn’t very high.
• Identify URLs and content that are useless.
• Remove content from your website that is out-of-date, irrelevant, or otherwise useless in terms of SEO.

8. Backlinks

As many inbound links as you can should be counted, especially when editing your website to remove dated or unnecessary information.

It is preferable to preserve a page that doesn’t perfectly meet your redesign or rebranding goal but has a lot of inbound links because a sudden decrease in inbound links to your website can also cause a decline in rankings.

Make a thorough note of your backlinks if you’re thinking about changing your domain so you can reroute the web pages with backlinks to the new URLs. You may need to narrow the list down based on the connecting website’s domain authority (and how it stacks up against yours) and status (online or offline), then pick the most advantageous ones. 

9. Hide The Staging Site

Create a test site that is inaccessible to users and search engine crawlers since you don’t want them sniffing around your half-baked pie.

You can do the following to make sure that search engines are not categorizing and taking into consideration the material and components that are currently under development:

• Utilize the staging environment that your local hosting company provides. Most hosting companies have that feature available with only one click.

• All new pages that will be a part of your revamped websites should be given the no-index meta robot’s tag.

• Utilize your CMS’s no-index functionality. This function is known as “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” in WordPress, for instance.

• The test website can also be password-protected so that neither users nor search engine crawlers can see it.

• You can display the under-construction notice for your test site with WordPress and other CMS types. The Under Construction plugin in WordPress can be used to accomplish that.

10. Website Structure

Both web crawlers and users can more easily grasp your website thanks to its architecture and the guide to website redesign while maintaining SEO in ten steps.

Here are some suggestions to bear in mind for website architecture:

• Your website architecture can become more comprehensive as you add more content and web pages, but “extensive” doesn’t have to mean difficult, at least not for crawlers.

• The bots can better understand website structure and perceive the entire website as a single resource with the aid of a good architecture.

• Additionally, having better-organized categories, content, products, and services on your revamped website may be more advantageous for your consumers from a UX/UI standpoint.

• To thoroughly examine your site’s structure, you could utilize a site crawler like Screaming Frog or Site bulb.

Conclusion 

After reading the Website Redesign While Maintaining SEO in ten steps guide. Now, you know how we ensure that your website’s SEO is maintained while we revamp it? The quick response is to regularly examine, update, and re-analyze prior to, during, and following the website overhaul. SEO is a never-ending activity that needs continual attention. To keep your material current and consistent with your brand messaging, save outdated information, make adjustments to the staging website, continually assess your SEO, and refresh your content. So, it is better not to take any risk but choose Colour Moon with an experience of 13+ years in website designing.

Do not attempt to redesign your website by yourself. To guarantee that the redesign of your website runs smoothly, work with our digital professionals at Colour Moon. Together, we’ll redesign and build your stunning new website, and we’ll implement the necessary SEO best practices to maintain and even boost your traffic and rankings. We can also assist if you’ve previously redesigned your website and need assistance re-establishing organic traffic through inbound marketing initiatives or paid advertising. Get a quote right away to learn more about what we can do for your company.

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