Tips to Maintain SEO Rankings Even After Website Redesign

In every business, there comes a time when you need to redesign your website. The reason for a website redesign can be anything like:

• To convey brand values in a clearer way
• To enhance website usability
• To boost SEO and performance
• To improve lead quality
• To make it responsive
• To stay ahead of the competition

However, redesigning a website might affect your SEO ranks negatively because it involves numerous factors. This can be a challenge for real!

Hire a competent SEO agency in London to avoid that and keep your website’s SEO metre healthy.

What are the rewards of a website redesign?

A website design involves humongous alterations to your website. It may include structure, content, visuals, or elements of your code, resulting in a complete makeover of your website.

Benefits

• Streamlined user experience
• Improved SEO
• Better website performance
• Revamped content strategy yielding better results
• Reduced load times
• Renewed data security

Do you need a website redesign?

Consider your website from the perspective of a visitor. Then check if it ticks all of the following factors or not:

• On-point branding
• Load time of a page
• Effortless navigate
• Mobile optimisation
• Streamlined customer journey
• Find information easily

How to maintain SEO during website redesign?

Maintain URLs

It is best to keep all current URLs when rebuilding a website, especially for pages that are already ranking organically.

It’s not suitable for consumers or search engines to change a page’s website URL for no apparent reason. Changing the URL poses the danger of wiping off the SEO value of a page. Especially when you’ve invested time generating links and improving their rank.

To retain the URL structure, the web design agency in London will update the page’s appearance and content, yet the URL will remain the same.

However, sometimes you do need to alter a URL structure significantly. For example, the URL name of your current site doesn’t contain a keyword, and the page structure is really poor.

Information architecture and content

SEO success depends on the context of the website’s subject matter generally and on the sub-topics of your themes. It also impacts the organisation of the content on site.

Making sure that everyone involved with the project is aware of how modifications to the overall content plan in the redesign, sitemap, and information architecture can affect SEO is crucial.

The future site should not be devoid of any pages that are important to your SEO strategy, and the design should not detract from the overarching message and theme of any parts.

However, SEO services in London can assist you because they use tools to locate all of your website’s pages and use the existing sitemap to determine the needs for the new ones.

Optimise the content you want to keep

An ideal time to update and breathe new life into outdated information is during a website revamp.

There is no doubt that content deterioration is genuine. Your finest pages can unexpectedly fall in the ranks as a result of new information and investments made by rivals in their content.

Hence, it’s critical to optimise your existing pages because falling from the top position will instantly decrease your organic traffic.

So, hire an SEO agency in London to keep your content fresh and appealing.

Be careful with redirects

A website redesign will alter the entire structure of your website. There will be some page moves and even some page deletions.

The fact is that in the world of SEO, little adjustments can have a tremendous impact.

Making sure that you plan for 301 redirects for all pages that are gaining new URLs and those that are disappearing in the rebuilt site makes sense from the standpoint of the user experience.

Though search engines do not have a problem with 404 redirects, link equity when backlinks to your websites give a 404 error.

Tips for mapping URL redirects

• Develop a list of all the URLs you intend to maintain as well as those you won’t be utilising anymore.
• Make a second list of the stuff you want to keep and give it a new URL.
• Compare each outdated URL to its successor.
• Match each URL you are getting rid of to fresh material that deals with a related subject.
• Provide developers with a list of new content mapping situations so they can implement redirects.

When all your redirects are planned out, ensure they are executed on the server or in a plug-in and prepared for launch.

Submit XML sitemaps

Submit the XML sitemap once you are confident that your redirects are functioning properly and that SEO has been implemented on the live site.

Your website’s blueprint is similar to your XML sitemap. It’s essential for effective website redesign SEO because search engines utilise it to comprehend the meaning of your content.

Make sure that the dynamic sitemap has the entire set of intended destination URLs. Create a fresh static sitemap right away, check it, and submit it if you are using one.

If this task baffles you, hiring a web design agency in London is best because they have a team of technical experts.

Post-redesign audit

Every aspect of redesigning a website won’t be perfect immediately because it is a monumental task.

These flaws can have serious repercussions if you publish your new site without testing. Although it’s tempting to launch your new website as soon as feasible, testing must take time. Analyse all of the modifications on your test site, thoroughly review the website or hire a web design service in London.

Conclusion

Website redesign sounds simple, but it is equally complicated and a time-consuming task. Moreover, when you make common mistakes, it might lead to bitter consequences. So, hiring a web design agency in London is beneficial and smart.