Firstly, redesigning your website is very important, because technology is constantly updating, which is why you have to be quick and up-to-date. It’s better to be ahead of the competition rather than seeming out of your depth. The frequency of redesigning your website will depend on a number of criteria. Which sector is it for, what is the competition doing, has a new technology made another obsolete? We think that you should redesign your website at least every 5 years. Finally, while redesigning your website and, if you haven’t already done so, get your website translated!
In fact, redo your entire website, it gives you the chance to display a more modern, positive, and dynamic company image. It is also a great way to improve your company’s image. Publishing international content can be a risky business. There is a chance of losing the SEO that you have implemented up until now, therefore leaving you to start from scratch.
Many businesses rely on natural research engines, which is to say, being the first page to come up due to natural referencing, in order to get more prospective customers. However, if Google degrade the business’ position because of bad quality website design, the business can seriously suffer the consequences. To avoid these unpleasant surprises, there are three important rules to follow:
- Understand what works with SEO
- Know the most common problems related to website redesign
- Have a detailed plan of the website changes
Understand what works with SEO
In this first step, you must identify what works well with SEO. What are the keywords and key themes that give you good results? You have to identify these important elements so that you can understand what works well and develop on these subjects during the website redesign.
The most common problems related to website redesign
There are many reasons for which businesses redesign their websites. It can simply be an update, boosting their online communication, and/or wanting to generate more prospective clients. During this phase, the main changes and most common difficulties are as follows:
- Content being deleted (and disappearing from the view of Google’s machines!)
- The content can change
- The order of the content can be changed
- The URLs can be changed
- New content may be added
- The domain name may be changed
- Internet links can be altered
Each and every one of these changes can affect you SEO ranking. And if several of these manage to occur at once, then it will be very difficult to determine the cause.
For example, if a business changes its domain name and all of its content is https at the same time, the risk of content loss multiplies.
The best tips for redesigning your website and keeping your SEO score as is
By understanding what works on your website in terms of SEO, and the tricky bits to avoid, it is possible to implement your redesigning objectives. The two main tips are:
- Preserving the number of site viewers and the SEO ranking in search engines
- Increasing the number of viewers and the ranking
Here are some tips
- Where possible, keep the URLs as they are. Because by keeping the URLs identical, the risk of losing content is reduced significantly.
- Use the redirecting response status code 301: This indicates to Google’s machines, the spiders, that the page has changed address.
- Optimising webpages. In order to this this, you should export the optimisation work from the old website: page headings, meta-descriptions, headers. It’s a simple rule, keep what works and only change what needs to be changed.
- Update your inbound links. This allows you to make a list of your inbound links, to give the webmasters of the websites that you are redesigning a heads up, and to put a redirection response status code 301 in place. The one thing to avoid above all else is the inbound link sending viewers to an error page “404 not found”. Google does not like this and judges it as a bad user experience, as well as the websites SEO ranking possibly being decreased.
- Internal links: You must pay attention to the structure of the internal links. As for inbound links, it is also very important that a link does not take a viewer to a page that has disappeared.
- Keep an eye on the SEO ranking: use the SEO website Hero Ninja to check your website’s ranking in terms of strategic keywords and if the redesigning has affected the ranking.
- Analyse the number of viewers: Is this number increasing or decreasing? With Google Analytics, it is possible to see the evolution of the website views, where they come from and the number of pages that were viewed, as well as time spent on the site.
One last piece of advice
To preserve your SEO ranking, and even develop it further during the redesigning of your website, the main things to keep in mind are:
- Understand what works with SEO
- Identify the areas that need improving
- Carefully plan the new website’s development
- Make sure to put redirection response status code 301 in the old website URLs to redirect viewers to the newer version
- Analyse the results
In short, redesigning a website should help the business to grow by attracting more website viewers and prospective clients, which leads to new customers. By implementing these main points, you will reach this goal. And don’t forget, when you are redesigning your website, it is a great time to think about having your website translated!