The SEO disasters that you need to avert during redesigning your website
Have you been thinking of redesigning a website or perhaps migrating to another CMS? If answered yes, this needs lot of hard work and planning. It can even get disastrous when you fail to take the best precautions for SEO. When it is done in the right manner, the procedure should be painless and easy but if done in the wrong way, redesigning a website can become disastrous. Who doesn’t know the importance and vitality of organic search? In case you lose majority of your traffic and search engine rankings, you will find fewer sales and leads at the same time.
If you wish to avert such a fate, you’ve probably clicked on the right post. Check out the few steps that you can take during migration, before it, during the launch of the new redesigned version and post-launch to reduce risk and avert the SEO disaster while redesigning your website.
Deducing the goals and planning the project
There must be few reasons behind you embarking on a website redesign. The reasons could be related to business use-cases, to bring about improvements in user experience, initiatives of marketing or for making SEO improvements. The ultimate way in which you can make sure your project will become successful is by setting the best and the most realistic goals. This is the time when you should ensure having a benchmark to which you could compare after a relaunch. You have to keep the SEO steps all lined out, set a timing ad also show the plan of quality control in front of all for making sure the SEO is taken care of at each step.
Information and Content Architecture
Overall, it is the context of the website which matters as the sub-topic themes are crucial for achieving SEO success. This can be built through the definite content on the website and the way in which the content can be organized. There will be changes to the sitemap, to the information architecture and the content plan and this is what SEO needs to be involved and which will help in driving conversions. Wouldn’t you wish to check whether or not the vital pages have become omitted from the website? You also have to make sure that the overall message of the website is not diluted by the redesigning of the website.
On-page optimization
When you dig deeper into the level of pages, the relevance of content as per the intent of the searcher is vital to maintain. When you know the context that’s changing and the entire architecture, you can work to proactively optimize the level of the page with the few elements which help with relevance, like page title, URL, body copy, meta-description, alt text and such things.
During the Launch
During the time of launch, you would wish to follow the go-live checklist and perform the quality control checks of the work which you had done till date on the staging website. Don’t give the green signal for launch if the redirects or on-page work are not tested or are not in place. Instead it is easier to delay launch than undoing the damage or rolling back the old website.
You always need to remember that SEO is not a one-time thing. As the stage of monitoring is in motion, you can slide back to the ultimate plan and thereby determine the performance of the relaunched website post designing. Hereafter, you can get back to the normal plan on ongoing optimization.
