From time to time, businesses need to redesign their website to stay current with the latest trends, incorporate new software, and add a fresh visual style.
However, this process carries a certain degree of risk. Unless you take precautions to minimize the disruption caused by the transition, your rankings could suffer, with some businesses known to lose as much as 70 percent of their organic traffic following a redesign.
After redesigning your website, there are five SEO checks to make to ensure the best performance …
1: Have you Performed an Audit on your Existing Site (if you have one)?
For businesses already running a website, an audit can help you to avoid old problems with your redesigned domain. An SEO agency or specialist will examine the existing site, searching for problems or missed opportunities that may affect the quality of your organic traffic.
2: Do All Redirects Work?
Your redesigned site should employ 301 redirects for pages that are being removed or undergoing URL alterations. 301 redirects stop websites giving 404 errors, which are a major frustration to users. Any such flaws on your site could seriously affect your rankings.
3: Are your Descriptions and Titles Written with SEO in Mind?
All titles and descriptions should be crafted with SEO in mind. Keep them brief, with keywords at the start and the site’s name appearing at the title’s end.
Meta descriptions should be written for users, designed to persuade them to click through from the results page.
4: Is your Site Optimized for Mobile?
Mobile search is gradually overtaking from computers, so any redesign must include optimization for mobile devices.
Consider how your new design will appear on smaller screens – will it be too compact, and is there will much media slow loading times to infuriating levels? Is navigation efficient, or are users likely to lose patience and leave?
If you answer yes to any of these, you need to invest more time in tweaking the site for the best quality of use on mobile devices. Use the Google Mobile Friendly Test for help.
5: Are your Sitemaps Up to Date?
Sitemaps provide crawlers with a directory, giving them the data they need to identify all pages in the redesigned website. There should be a sitemap in XML and HTML formats.
XML maps are designed for search engines to understand the site, providing technical information such as: the URL’s last update date; the frequency of changes; and the importance of each page in accordance with others on the site.
HTML maps, on the other hand, are built to help users navigate. This is an overview of every page, and its usefulness can easily be underestimated.
As an Orange County SEO agency, we can give you all the help you need to redesign your website. Our expert team will perform all checks to maintain your rankings and minimize disruption to your performance.