You may need to redesign your website for several reasons. It could be as simple as your brand evolving and needing your website updated to reflect the new image. It could be to keep up with the latest technological advancements or simply to help you look fresher and provide a smoother experience for your audience.
Whatever the case, SEO is a vital resource in helping your website be found by prospects, grow your audience and keep your rankings in the search engines.
Read on to discover insider tips and guidance from SEO Agency, Hedgehog on how to implement SEO in your website redesign and succeed with SEO in your website redesign.
Internal Links
When rebuilding a website for the SERPs, internal linking is one of the easiest and surest ways to improve and enhance your page’s authority in Google’s eyes. It is important for all of your pages to be linked to each other and easily navigated to. The easier your website is to use, the more likely you will rank high on Google. If they can find your page without hassle, it will build trust in your brand and users will stay on your page longer, which tells Google your page is important to what the user is searching for and will place your page accordingly.
If a page cannot be found via internal links, it will be harder for the search engine to crawl and index it. Ideally, your important pages should never be more than three clicks away from your homepage. The closer they are, the more authority they have and the more likely it is that Google will deem them as important to a SERP.
While optimising your pages during the rebuild, it is best to always be keeping an eye out for opportunities to link to other pages on your site. Linked pages have more value and increase Google’s understanding of your website. This will help draw users to the most important pagest, allowing your brand to grow and your website to perform more powerfully than before.
On-Page Optimisation
Other aspects of on-page optimisation include:
- Page Title: This is the first thing visitors will see so make sure it is snappy, relevant and eye-catching. Make sure it’s under 60 characters and that it includes your main keyword.
- Meta Description: This is the part on a SERP beneath the heading that summarises the page. Make sure it is short, succinct and descriptive as you want to draw the visitor in.
- Headers: Use H1, H2 and H3 headers throughout your work. Not only are they an excellent way to split up your content into chunks, they are also a good way for you to emphasise your keywords and enhance their importance. In addition, it will help users navigate the page, and Google will understand the content better.
On-page optimisation is an important part of SEO; it is like your front of house, the main thing the visitor is going to be looking at and reading and the main thing that will help them in their search journey, going above and beyond to answer their query. You don’t want a high bounce rate, so make sure your content is engaging, informative and tailored to the user’s search intent. The longer they stay on your page, the easier it is for Google to flag your page as valuable and rank it higher in the SERPs.
Format Your URLs
Every little detail and aspect of a website is important to make sure it is operating at optimum efficiency, with SEO doing everything in its power to signal to Google that your pages are authoritative and valuable. A part of this is making sure your URLs are formatted correctly to not be detrimental to your website’s performance.
Formatting your URLs is one of the basic signposts of on-site SEO, and it’s important to carry this out first, as editing live URLs is a lot more complicated. The most successful URLs are relevant to the page and are clear and succinct. If they are overly long, it reduces their readability; they are unappealing and distracting to users, meaning that they won’t click on your link. Don’t include random numbers and characters and make sure you separate your words with hyphens. It’s always a good idea to have keywords as well. This helps your URL and your content to work together to showcase your importance to Google, increasing your authority and helping to display the relevance of your page to users.
Sometimes you can end up with several URLs for the same page, whether because they have been automatically generated or you have forgotten about previous URLs. This can be confusing to Google as it tries to crawl and index your page, so get in the habit of marking the main URL with the canonical attribute in the code.
So long as you utilise SEO to help your URLs become short, relevant and meaningful to the content and the user, you should face no problems on this side of things as it will go a long way to making your pages more powerful and increase your chances of users clicking on your link on the SERP.
HTTPS Formatting
Trust and reliability are important in the SEO process. You want your users to find value in your content and trust your site to generate leads and encourage business for your brand. This can be as simple as having the correct formatting in your URL.
HTTPS is an updated, seurer version of the old HTTP format. This is especially important for websites that deal with personal information. Users need to be able to trust that their details are in safe hands. The ‘S’ in HTTPS stands for SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). This technology encrypts your website to prevent any personal data from being leaked or hacked into.
Having an SSL certificate promotes your reliability to users, especially if you are an e-commerce website. Remember to use SEO to perform an audit before you launch your pages. Some HTTPS sources can suffer from mixed content - images, videos, and other media originating from HTTP (without the ‘s’). This can signal to Google that your page isn’t HTTPS at all and it’s a very easy issue to overlook. Make sure to give all the resources you’ve used for your page a once-over before launching your rebuilt website to make sure your HTTPS page is recognised for what it is and help it make an impact in the SERPs. Google has a preference for SSL pages so it is always beneficial to make sure you are in line with these preferences to increase your chances of ranking further.
Mobile Optimisation
SSL is also useful for mobile optimisation. It is a requirement for AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) as this technology helps pages load quickly on mobile. Mobile optimisation is one of the most important aspects of SEO as more and more people access the internet from their phone. As of January 2021, 58 million people in the UK use mobile internet which amounts to 89% of the population. A smooth and flawless website performance is more invaluable than ever.
Of course, you still have to build your website on desktop though Google relies on mobile versions of your page when deciding on rankings. So the recommended course of action is to take the website built for your desktop and adapt it to mobile view for maximum efficiency and the best of both worlds.
The most important thing about the mobile redesign is to make sure the page can adapt to fit different sizes of screen. It’s frustrating having to scroll left and right all the time to try and view all the information or try and flip your phone’s screen into landscape mode. On the other hand, ease of use guarantees users have a positive experience, building trust and making your page more valuable.
Mobiles, due to having smaller screens and mechanics - often operate at lower internet connections. To this end, it’s important to utilise SEO to ensure the resources on your pages are kept simple and effective to allow everything to load properly and keep your page looking actionable and attractive for both mobile and desktop visitors.
To help your website work in optimum condition on mobile, it’s best to follow these simple actionable tips that can help improve user experience on your mobile:
- Create light pages - compress images, avoid redirects, allow browser caching and use code minifiers (removing unnecessary data without affecting how the code is processed in the browser). This will help your page to load quickly (preferably under three seconds) and help your page run smoothly on mobile.
- Don’t use pop-ups - pop-ups are annoying enough on desktop pages but on mobile, they can take up even more space and make viewing the content tedious. If you do use a pop-up, make sure they’re small and at the edge of the screen, so they don’t get in the way of the information the visitor is searching for.
- Design for touch screens - touch screens by nature involve a lot of tapping. If the buttons/links are too small and close together, it can be hard to navigate, especially for the clumsier, less precise tappers among us. Make sure the buttons are reasonably sized and spaced apart for ease of use.
- Easy navigation - With less features than on a desktop page, it’s important for your pages to be navigable with elements like menu and search being readily available and operation with a simple tap to make it easier to find content.
Image Optimisation
Images are an important part of any content, breaking up large blocks of text with visuals encouraging engagement in visitors and keeping their interest on the page so they don’t click. It is important to optimise your images so that this vital feature operates smoothly and maintains the value of the page.
Compressing them is the easiest way to make your page lighter and help images load quicker. This enhances the user’s experience and improves your rankings on a SERP. There are a few ways to compress your images, such as using online tools such as TinyPNG and Kraken or using plug-ins, some of which are available on WordPress like Optimole and ShortPixel Image Optimiser. This will help your images look as good as possible, increasing the power of the page and making your content richer and more optimal for the search engines.
You can also describe your images with captions, file names and the image alt tag. This tells Google what your image is, increasing its importance to the search engine, the content of your page and the visitor. Again, it’s important to be specific and it can’t hurt to incorporate your keywords into the tag to enhance the message you want sent to the SERPs so you get more of the audience you are targeting.
Sitemaps
One of the last things to do before launching your rebuilt website is to construct a sitemap, of which there are two types, HTML (for visitors) and XML (for Google). Creating an XML sitemap is a great way to speed up Google’s process of crawling and indexing your site. A sitemap is comprised of all the pages you want Google to crawl, making it easier for Google to navigate to the pages you want it to without going the long way around and starting on the homepage and following links.
Most website builders automatically generate a sitemap which can be found at xxx.com/sitemap.xml. To submit a sitemap, just go to Google Search Console, go to Sitemaps, add a location and hit submit. This will help you go a long way along the process of getting your page ranked.
HTML sitemaps are the sitemaps that users can view and are a great way to provide visitors with a simple, easy to use overview of the entire website. Working a lot like chapters in a book, users can just find the relevant link and be taken straight to the page. Using SEO to develop your sitemaps is vital for improving the user experience and making your most important information even easier to find for both visitors and Google. It even links nicely back to internal links as you have placed all the links on one page in a natural, easy to use page, making it a lot more convenient than trawling through content pages looking for the telltale blue words that might take you through to the page you want.
Review your sitemap before submitting it. Make sure it’s relevant, with canonical URLs, no redirects and no URLs blocked from indexing. Update it with new pages regularly and add other tags outside of the URL location, such as page priority, update frequency and the last time it was updated to help Google along in its journey of understanding your website. And remember, just because there’s a limit of 50,000 URLs for a sitemap doesn’t mean you should try and put in as many as possible. The shorter a sitemap is, the better, as this is the best way to project to Google what your most important pages are, which increases your chances of ranking.
Website Audit
All that’s left to do now is audit your website and make sure everything’s working as it should be. This is where you check the page speed of your website, look for any issues on mobile page rendering, check the content is formatted correctly and carry out the technical audit which checks your crawlability and indexing issues.
One of the big things you don’t want is broken links and 404 errors. You want your users to be able to find the information they’re looking for without any of the frustration and hassle that a 404 page can kick up. The less 404 pages generated, the more reliable and trustworthy your website will be to users, increasing time spent on your pages and helping you rank higher in the SERPs.
Spend time after the website has launched to carry on checking everything to make sure it is all running smoothly. If there any issues, it’s a good idea to be on top of it so that you can resolve problems easily, maintain your ranking and keep your page as a trustworthy and valuable source of information to users.
Rebuilding your website is all about the harmony between the user and the search engine. The goal is to make sure your site is the best it can be for both sides of the equation and SEO is the surest way to make sure your website performs well. It helps to increase your website’s efficiency and makes your pages and content more valuable to the visitor and to Google, broadcasting your site’s importance, getting you ranked higher in the SERPs and generating traffic for your business. SEO is thorough, effective and guarantees you will end up with a much more powerful website than you would have if you tried to rebuild without SEO.