Are you planning on redesigning your website? Are you scared of losing your ranking on SERP?
Take a deep breath! What if we tell you that there is a way to revamp your website without losing your rank, would you believe us?
No matter how beneficial and popular your service or product is, an outdated website design can ruin your business. This helps you leave a strong first impression and in case it fails to gain consumers’ trust, they will not become your customer. Therefore, keeping up with the latest design trends for websites is important to stay ahead in the market.
Search Engine Optimisation rankings are sensitive and prone to evolving whenever there’s an improvement in the website design or the content without planning for SEO. During a website redesigning process, there is a high risk of your website losing organic traffic, sales, and ranking. While there are blogs and other content online that play a huge role in making a website rank higher up on the SERP, Search Engine Results Pages. However, very few talk about preserving those ranks, even during the process of revamping the website.
So, shall we cover the tips to consider when redesigning your website to preserve your ranking?
Great!
SEO AUDIT: Before you commence operation redesigning the website, perform an SEO audit. It helps you evaluate the popular ranking keyword, low-quality keywords, the pages that receive the most traffic, and more. Based on the insights, you should always stay one step ahead. Adopting the best on-page optimisation practice will work better for you.
AESTHETICS SHOULD NOT BE YOUR ONLY FOCUS: Another reason why people prefer redesigning a website is to boost aesthetic appeal, and we agree. It should not be your only focus. It is advised to analyse and inspect your website from the perspective of SEO. For example, you must prefer adhering to the on-page SEO practices, which helps you align your website with the search engine’s demands and aesthetics. From keyword research, and meta titles, to content updates and loading speed enhancement- there are a lot of things to handle.
DON’T MESS WITH URLs: It is advised to make drastic changes to your website, this means, avoiding changing the domain. If you change this, the entire system of the website will be affected, in turn, which can lead to collapsing your SEO efforts. This means, keeping the existing URLs with a high ranking and traffic. If some pages have low traffic or ranking, you can try updating the URLs.
ASSESS INTERNAL LINKING: You should know that internal linking helps keep the link juice flowing. For a website with low-ranking pages to high-ranking pages, the former will receive link juice, thus boosting the rank. As they don’t have any ranking, they will benefit from the flowing link juice from the high-ranking pages. It will lead visitors or consumers from one page to another and can frustrate them. The search engine will consider such pages quite difficult to find and fail to feature them on high ranking.
SET UP 301 REDIRECTS: Redirecting OLD URLs to new ones is important at times. If you are planning to make major changes to the permalink structure, it is essential to have a spreadsheet of all related redirects. Once the website is live, crawl the list of the URLs to ensure that every redirect works. In such conditions, 301 and 302 redirects come into play.
Let’s wrap up with maintaining rankings during redesigning!
SEO, as we all know, is a long-term marketing strategy, with numerous competitors in the market trying hard to knock you off the top results. Best ways to keep your website up and in the game, and to boost domain authority. So, keeping these earlier-mentioned tips in mind during the redesigning will help you sustain and improve your SEO.