10 Critical SEO Considerations for Website Redesign

10 Critical SEO Considerations for Website Redesign

How to Preserve Your Google Mojo!

So you are thinking about redesigning your business website, are you? That is not a bad idea, considering how fast the digital world is changing in 2021. Even a two-year-old site may no longer meet the expectations of ever more demanding and sophisticated mobile consumers.

But simply redesigning your website may do more harm than good. If you want your website redesign to meet your business objectives, don’t overlook these key SEO considerations as part of your project.

Website redesigns carry a significant level of risk to your existing organic search rankings. And for e-commerce sites, this can cause a substantial drop in revenue. If your business website redesign is not SEO-appropriate, the new website can experience a drop in rankings and site traffic.

You can reduce the risk associated with a website redesign by addressing these key SEO considerations before you start your website redesign.

10 Critical SEO Considerations

Preserve Your Link Inventory

Find out where your most important or relevant links originate. Ask these sites to update their links to point to your new site pages. This information allows you to preserve your inbound links.

Create Enough Content

Having too little text or too much text can negatively affect how search engines perceive a page’s relevance. We recommend a minimum of 250-300 words or more per page. Remember, the interest of your customers comes before yours. Make sure you provide consumers with the content they need.

A key SEO consideration is to ask yourself: ‘what is the purpose of this web page? Why would people come to it? What do they want to do when they get here? What to do we want them to do, and how do we make it easy for them to do it?’ Then create content by answering these questions.

Optimize Your Content

When search engines crawl, index, and rank websites, they are looking for content. Make it easy for all the friendly bots and spiders. Optimize your content for your keywords and long-tail key phrases. That includes page titles, page URLs, Meta descriptions, and image tags.

Update Your Sitemaps

Be sure to include a standard HTML sitemap to help customers navigate a substantial website and an XML sitemap to help the search engine spiders crawl your site.

BONUS TIP: check if your website has more than one XML sitemap! Especially CMS sites often create separate XML sitemaps for different types of content. Be sure to submit all of them to search engines!

Don’t Forget Internal Linking

Another of our key SEO considerations is to use text navigation and keyword-rich text links to link your internal site pages. Internal linking ensures both search engines and human visitors can access all of your essential website content.

Optimize Content for Search

Be sure to optimize all of your images, videos, press releases, and blog posts for search. For images and videos, this means checking they are of suitable size and quality. Be sure to compress them as small as possible. Press releases and blog posts should be optimized for keywords and contain at least one appropriate or relevant image.

Optimizing content is something that should be ongoing on any business website. If you overlooked this so far, this must be part of your website redesign.

Map Out Content / URL Structure

Another of the critical SEO considerations most folks overlook is your website structure. The organization and delivery of your website content can have a dramatic effect on your search engine rankings. When you create your new content, make sure you organize it in a way that makes it easy for visitors to find.

Don’t forget that modern, mobile consumers don’t read; they scan. Give them content that is easy to consume on mobile devices, with options to see more.

Test Design Changes

Be sure to set up a test or staging environment for your website redesign. Test everything from home page mockups to site navigation, and other on-page optimization or usability factors. Testing allows you to determine the optimal design and functionality and address all of these critical SEO considerations before you go live!

Use 301 Redirects

If you do need to redirect any of your old content to your new website, be sure to use 301 (permanent) redirects. Correctly implementing redirects prevents visitors to your old page URLs from seeing the dreaded 404 pages.

Update Your 404 Page

The final of our critical SEO considerations for website redesign is to update your 404 pages. The 404 or Page Not Found page is not well-liked, and therefore often forgotten. But it does serve a beneficial purpose. If your site visitors do end up on your 404 pages, they should be as friendly and informative as possible.

If you just completed a website redesign, you should mention that. Apologize ahead of time for any inconvenience. Be sure to include helpful tips, a link to your new HTML sitemap, and an easy way to contact you if all else fails.

BONUS TIP: Follow Google Webmaster Guidelines

Doing so will allow Google to find, index, and rank your new website and mitigate the risk of losing your Google rankings: Google Webmaster Guidelines

Critical SEO Considerations and Your Website Redesign

OK, now that wasn’t so bad, was it? Our critical SEO considerations for website redesign are pretty straightforward and easy to follow. We kept them short and sweet on purpose. If you are already familiar with some of the basics of SEO, or if you write your content, you know some of this. Other things may be unfamiliar, but don’t worry.

Most businesses don’t redesign their websites in-house. So most likely, you have already engaged a professional web designer to handle this for you. In that case, they can help you address these critical SEO considerations. If you are doing this on your own, and if you don’t have an existing SEO service provider, you really should consider getting some professional help.

The technical SEO of a website redesign can be a little beyond the skills of many business owners. If your web design agency can’t handle this, someone else will have to. Otherwise, you stand the risk of a significant drop in site rankings, visitors, and potentially lost revenue. And that can take a very long time to recover from this.

You can also find more SEO and other mobile-first web design tips on our blog.

Do You Need Help With Your Website Redesign?

Here at PixoLabo, we offer a full range of mobile-first web design and search engine optimization services. We help businesses and product brands to improve their mobile user experience, search rankings, and increase conversions. Contact us and find out how our team can help you benefit from a website redesign without negatively affecting your search rankings.

Did You Take These Key SEO Considerations into Account for Your Redesign?

Are you considering a redesign for your business website? Or have you recently completed one?  Did you take any of these critical SEO considerations into account? And how did that work out for you? Please feel free to comment below so our audience can benefit and grab our feed, so you don’t miss our next post! And feel free to share our post with your audience!

Thank you! We appreciate your help to end bad business websites, one pixel at a time!

By Gregor Saita
Co-Founder / CXO
@gregorsaita