You have redesigned your website to uplift your business or updated it as per the latest design trends. Now, your primary concern is how to preserve your previous rankings? In this case, maintaining your online visibility and presence becomes a challenge. There are many other risks involved, such as
- Drop in the number of your customers.
- Online reputation.
- Losing website and consumer information.
You might have spent a lot of time optimizing your website earlier. These efforts must not go to waste and carry forward in your redesign. SEO measures need to be taken into account there and then. Otherwise, you will not be able to catch up with your competitors and rankings for long. In this article, we’ll discuss handy measures for the same to retain your SEO rankings.
How to Save SEO Ranking During a Website Redesign?
Taking precautions is far better than repenting unable to do the repairs later. Catch hold of all the SEO considerations beforehand to be on the safer side. Further, you can take care of website optimization before making it live. You need to double-check everything on the new website for 2-3 days. Then, you can take down your previous site. Consider these steps:
Perform SEO Audit of the new website
Website auditing will give a clear picture of the present status of the new website. It is worth the time investment. You’ll come to know about many loopholes by performing an audit of the site. There are SEO monitoring tools available online. You can any of them, such as SEMrush, Google Search Console, SEO site checkup, and others.
Basically, you can look out for SEO metrics such as:
- Compare present and previous organic traffic.
- Speed of your website.
- The number of backlinks coming from authority websites.
After this, you know the problems that are hampering the efficiency and performance of your website. You can contact SEO experts to fix any issues and optimize your redesigned website.
Make sure to secure the website data.
Data is like the soul of the complete website. It takes months to develop credible content, including articles, images, infographics, podcasts, or videos. Securing your website’s previous data saves you time, customers, and money.
Further, you may have some eCommerce website or site that deals with some business. Then, it becomes necessary to save business-related information like:
- Product information and its description.
- Critical data about clients.
- Sales history.
- Customer earlier grievances.
Losing this information can even cost you legal issues or potential customers. So, convert it into a CSV file to access it any time later.
Try to maintain the same URL structure.
URLs are a vital optimization part. They are symbolic of your brand information. Further, URLs receive the link juice from other websites. URLs are everywhere on your social media, online journals, and your industry partners.
So, changing URLs structure from all the places is not an easy task. Maintaining the same URLs for most of your web page will save you unnecessary changes.
Further, it will retain your ranking position on SERPs. For achieving this, your wed management team can discuss how many previous URLs will work fine and how many new ones will be sufficient. URLs that don’t follow SEO recommendations like include keywords, hyphens, short ones, easily understandable need restructuring.
Mention 301 and 404 Redirects wherever applicable
Verify all types so that none of it is left dangling in the air. Otherwise, it will be the worst-case SEO scenario! Users come to your web pages but find a blank page. So, it is important to take care of these cases.
The first type of URL is which doesn’t hold any relevance. For example, the obsolete product pages or product/services/niche information has changed completely. For those web pages, it is best to delete them.
But, how will users and search engines come to about this? Mention 404 status error code. Make this page a little bit more refreshing by putting compelling images with it. You can even add the related page link to it.
Talking about search engines, you can submit a 404 web page file report in the Google search console. Google will automatically delete these pages from its indexing within a month.
Furthermore, you have done restructuring of the web address, assign 301 status code to it. With this, all the previous customers and people from backlinks will get a safe place to land.
Revamp your content
Update the previous secured content to the new website. Then, it is time to add new content to spread your customers’ fresh energy and vibes.
You can build content with the latest keywords, filling the competitor’s gap and addressing the customer needs. It will bring more potential customers to your website.
For this, you can start with visual content. You can pick graphics or images from obsolete web pages. Tweak it a bit and use it to give different angles to the fresh content.
Furthermore, recheck all your meta tags, H1, H2, and image tags, before launching your website. Optimize the size of images and videos to provide an optimal user experience.
Conclusion
Let’s wind up the topic; redesign is essential to update your website according to market requirements. Being double of all aspects of SEO will save previous customers. And it will even bring new visitors to your website.
Optimize your new content while adding value to it from the previous content. Redirects are a sure-shot way to lead clients to correct places and deindex deleted ones. Auditing your website will help you fix any loopholes in the site. So, follow the steps mentioned above in the article to get a secured SEO website.
