In our increasingly online world, your website is often the place where your customers interact with your business the most. Therefore, if your site is difficult to navigate, lags on certain pages, or is simply outdated, this can damage user experience, customer satisfaction, and even your business’s reputation. Luckily, a strategic website website redesign can improve your brand’s influence and also can significantly increase your SEO rankings.
This guide, which walks you through the website redesign process, provides crucial tips on how to relaunch your website and boost your SEO performance through strategic design choices.
Understanding How Website Redesign Impacts SEO
It’s important to note that if you fail to navigate the website redesign process smoothly, this can disrupt your existing SEO rankings. This is because structural changes during redesigns, such as new page layouts, different URL paths, and even deleted content, can break down existing links, confusing search engines.
However, if you take the time to build a strong site redesign plan and work to ensure you boost existing and new elements properly, you can significantly increase your SEO rankings and help your business grow. Good website redesign focuses on optimized content, improved mobile-friendly sites, fast load times, and easy-to-navigate site architecture. To ensure you reap the full benefits of a website redesign, it’s important to take the process step by step.
Step 1: Conduct a Website Audit
To ensure your site redesign focuses on the right areas, it’s important to conduct a website audit. Your audit should assess factors such as top-performing backlinks, top-performing keywords and searches, site speed, the average time a user spends on your site, and more. It’s crucial that you identify any issues with your site, including pages that are slow to load, empty or broken links, and hard-to-navigate pages.
By understanding this data, you can preserve crucial content that is performing well while working to redesign lower-performing areas of your website in an informed, meticulous manner.
Step 2: Carefully Plan URL Structures and Redirects
Because URL structure plays a key role in SEO rankings, it’s important to make sure your current URLs stay intact, especially for pages that are performing well. If you cannot avoid making changes, plan ahead with a protocol to redirect any broken links. This can include creating 301 redirects for any URLs that have changed ahead of time, ensuring search engines are aware of the new location.
Keep in mind that multiple redirects for one page could slow down your site and negatively impact SEO, so be cautious when using redirects across your site. Throughout the redesign process, you should also regularly conduct crawl tests, making sure that no orphan pages or dead ends are present.
Step 3: Optimize Your New Pages
You can ensure that your new pages perform better by using Core Web Vitals performance metrics as your guide when optimizing your new site. These metrics measure page interactivity, speed, and visual stability, all of which Google uses to rank pages. These vitals are crucial to any effective SEO strategy. You can increase performance under this framework by ensuring mobile-friendly design, minimizing file sizes, and implementing a Content Delivery Network, or CDN.
Step 4: Update Your Metadata and Content
By optimizing your content and metadata for search engines and updating top-performing content for accuracy and relevance, you can ensure your site maintains strong SEO performance. When redesigning your site, you should look at overall existing content and metadata to ensure nothing is out of date.
If you have outdated content and data, take the time to build a robust strategy that adequately addresses how you can increase the content’s performance. In some cases, this may be done simply by replacing outdated content with fresh, optimized content. When creating your content, focus on key SEO elements like titles, meta descriptions, header tags, image alt text, and file names.
Step 5: Consistently Monitor and Update Your Redesign
After you have gone live with your new website, it’s essential that you continue to monitor its performance and update it as trends evolve. You should carry out an initial post-launch audit to find any mistakes that could have been missed, such as poor loading times, issues with mobile usability, missing redirects, or broken links.
From there, you should constantly track your keyword rankings and traffic through tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics. If you see a drop in performance, this could be an indicator of areas that may need to be refined.
Boost SEO and Win Over Customers With a Well-Planned Website Makeover
While website design can be an opportunity to reinvigorate your online presence and boost search engine rankings, it can also be challenging to do on your own. Imagine Monkey can help you plan each stage of your website redesign process, all while prioritizing your SEO and bringing your online presence to the next level. Contact us to learn more about our website redesign services.
