Is your business considering a website redesign or migration to a new domain? If so you need to plan a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy before your business face the risk of traffic loss. It’s not just enough to focus on creative elements, user data, and customer journey information while website redesigning. Website re-launches can negatively impact brand’s digital footprint if SEO is not integrated into the designing process. Here’s how you can avoid SEO disaster during website redesigning process:
- Know your website through SEO Audit
Usually during the creative redesigning process, the web page elements that help in achieving current ranking in search engines get lost. This SEO mistake can result in significant drop in search traffic. Consider SEO Audit of your current website to identify the strengths, weak elements, and opportunities for improvement. In a site audit, a SEO agency will examine problems with URL, H1 tags, missing or duplicate pages, XML sitemap, meta descriptions, and canonical tags, so that these issues can be addressed while redesigning a new site.
- Integrate a 301 Redirects plan into SEO strategy
When 301 redirects are not implemented, search engines reset the traffic and ranking value on the new pages, resulting in loss of both ranking as well as traffic. 301 Redirects is essential for guiding search engines to the new URL, preserving inbound links & internal links and retaining rankings.
- Inbound link check
Check to see which pages on your site (including subdomains) have inbound links and make sure those links are passed to your new website. A 301 redirect could ensure that this happens when redirecting your old URLs to new ones.
- On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization involves integrating target keyword phrases on appropriate pages, reviewing page titles and URL, and page description on each page. Also examine that there are no broken links in the pages and anchor text is consistent with keyword changes.
- Create XML and HTML sitemaps
It is necessary to create HTML and XML sitemaps for your new website because they tell search engines such as Google and Yahoo about your site structure and guide them to explore existing content that have been moved to a new URL.