In this competitive world, ensuring that your business website is up to date is essential. With the ever-changing design trends and innovation, your website must be user-friendly. This is why it is necessary to upgrade and redesign websites often. It is true that revamping a website design helps improve the overall conversion rate, site appearance, and visitors’ experience. But on the contrary, it can negatively impact the SEO score to a great instance. The importance of search engine optimization is known to everyone; thereby, having it tampered with to revamp SEO is still ongoing. To help you better understand and analyze the significant tricks, this blog explores some effective strategy that needs to be followed for assured results.
Why do you need to Redesign your Website?
A website redesign helps a website get a fresh look by effectively curating all small details. From overall content and structure to visuals and code, all are effectively changed, providing the website with a great appearance. Some of the essential benefits that redesigning a website can offer are:
- Simplifies effective user experience
- Provides better page load speed
- Effectively improves website performance and SEO
- Better appearance of the website page
Top Measures to Follow When Redesigning a Website
Now, redesigning a website without affecting the SEO is more complex than it appears. Let’s get to analyze the strategies that can be followed to revamp a website without affecting the SEO of the web page.
1. Conducting Comprehensive SEO Audit
A website redesign is a big decision and must be carefully analyzed without any random selection. Before selecting the redesign strategy, it is vital to do a thorough SEO audit of the website. This helps to understand both the strengths and weaknesses of a specific website. A definite redesign also allows you to understand the essential backlinks, keywords, and even the ability of overall content score. Some tangible ways these analyses can be rightly analyzed are with the help of Google Search Console, Analytics, and website performance. Doing a proper audit also identifies the areas that need improvement in a specific website over time. But it is crucial to hire the right web design company for redesigning.
2. Utilisation of existing URL Structure
Maintaining an existing URL structure is very important to avoid any challenges. It is vital to keep the previous URL intact for better value and rank of the website. Sudden URL changes can often lead to broken links and reduced rankings. Keeping the same old URLS for better help and analysis is best. To keep the URL intact, you can utilize the pages by designing a definite “site under maintenance” page to help users. The main aim is to implement 301 effectively from the old URLs to the new website. This ensures a seamless transition for search engines and users, preserving your SEO value.
3. Keyword Research and Integration
A comprehensive keyword research is essential when redesigning a website completely. Keywords work as the stepping stones in an SEO strategy. It effectively benefits and ensures that a website easily ranks in search engines and increases visibility. Identifying the right keywords is essential; based on the analysis, it is crucial to incorporate them strategically. Redesigning a website page with relevant keywords helps to make it stand out from the competition. This allows for instantly improve the overall SEO rank of the website if done by the best web designing company.
4. Optimize On-Page Elements
Website on-page optimization plays a significant role in improving the SEO score of a specific website. When redesigning, some practical elements that need to be considered are :
- Page Titles and Meta Descriptions: Try to effectively craft compelling and keyword-rich page titles along with meta descriptions that accurately reflect the content of each page. The selection should be such that users get a view of the page by just going through the title. Ow, while creating the titles, it is essential that you rightly maintain the character limit as advised by the search engines. This helps in offering effective and maximum visibility of the page.
- Header Tags: Users nowadays only have a little time to go through a website page completely. This is where the need for proper header tags comes into play. You must appropriately structure the header tags (H1, H2, H3). To boost the visibility of the header tags, you can also use relevant keywords to emphasize the website better.
- Image Optimization: Page load time in any website is straightaway turned down for users. Properly compressing images is one effective way to ensure your web page is well-optimized. But when optimizing the images, it is important to compress them without compromising the quality. The use of informative file names and alt tags can be rightly utilized for these detailings.
- Mobile Responsiveness: Ensure your redesigned website is mobile-friendly, as search engines prioritize mobile-responsive designs. Responsive websites provide an enhanced user experience and positively impact SEO rankings when done by the best custom web design company.
5. Effective and Valuable Content
In any website, content plays the main backbone of the website. When redesigning a website, using effective content for ranking web pages is crucial. Analyze your existing content, identify high-performing pages, and ensure they are seamlessly transferred to the new design. Maintain the same level of relevance, optimize for keywords, and consider improving upon the existing content to add more value to users. If you find valuable content from previous designs, implement it for your new design.
6. Maintaining Backlinks
Backlinks are a vital ranking factor for search engines. Preserving existing backlinks is essential to maintain your SEO score when redesigning your website. Conduct a backlink analysis using tools like Ahrefs or Moz to identify valuable backlinks. Doing a proper research can help you update the URL as and when needed. Additionally, focus on creating fresh, high-quality content that attracts new backlinks to enhance your SEO performance. However, hire the right web design and development company for better help.
7. Monitor and Analyze
After completing the website redesign, closely monitor your website’s performance and SEO score. Track the key metrics, such as organic traffic, bounce rate, average session duration, and conversions, to gauge the impact of the redesign. This helps to highlight the essential loopholes of the process, if any. Utilize analytics tools and set up regular reports to closely monitor rankings or organic traffic changes.
8. Implement 301 Redirects
There is no doubt that utilizing previous URLs is the best value for reimplementing website designs. However, If there are URL changes or page restructuring, ensure the implementation of proper 301 redirects. A definite 301 redirect is a permanent redirect that notifies search engines that a page has been moved to a new location. This helps keep the page’s value and utilize the URL function and search engine rank. When a specific 301 redirect is used, it instantly redirects the users from the old site to the new ones. This redirect helps to facilitate the challenge of overcoming broken links.
9. Create a Custom 404 Page
Even with meticulous planning, some pages need to be noticed during the website redesign process. To handle any potential broken links or missing pages, create a custom 404 error page. The 404 page should be user-friendly and visually appealing and provide clear navigation options to guide visitors back to relevant sections of your website. Creating a well-designed and informative 404 page can enhance the user experience and prevent negative impacts on SEO. Further, streamlining the entire process will facilitate a better user experience.
10. Updating XML Sitemap and Robots.txt
After the redesign, update your XML sitemap and robots.txt file to reflect the new structure of your website. XML sitemaps also help search engines understand the organization of your website and index it more efficiently. On the other hand, Robots.txt files guide search engine bots on which pages to crawl and index. Ensure these files are correctly updated and submitted to search engines, enabling them to correctly crawl and index your new website.
11. Engage in Content Marketing and Promotion
While the redesign is essential for maintaining SEO, engaging in content marketing and promotion efforts is equally crucial. The better you can market and promote your website page, the better it will reach more users. Developing a content strategy from a custom web design company that focuses on creating high-quality content is best to ensure the process is rightly evaluated. Publish blog posts, articles, infographics, and videos that provide value to your target audience. Promote your content through social media channels, email marketing, and outreach to relevant influencers or industry publications. By consistently producing and promoting valuable content effectively, you can attract more organic traffic and backlinks and improve your overall SEO score.
Conclusion
Redesigning a specific website is an exciting opportunity to enhance its visual appeal, functionality, and user experience. However, it is crucial to approach the redesign process with a strategic mindset to avoid any negative impact on the website’s SEO score. Following the tips mentioned above, any user can effectively redesign your website while maintaining or even improving your SEO rankings. With careful planning and execution, your effectively redesigned website from a professional web design company will attract organic traffic, engage users, and achieve optimal SEO results.
