The look and feel of a website are important factors that help to convey the quality of a site. No matter how great the content is, or how established the company is, a website that doesn’t “look good” isn’t going to provide a good brand experience. That’s why it’s in the best interest of website owners to refresh their website every few years with an updated design. Even though website design involves a completely different skill set than an SEO campaign, SEO still needs to be considered throughout the redesign process. If you are considering a website redesign, get your SEO team on board as quickly as possible. If you don’t have an SEO team, it might be a good time to look into getting one (or at least to hire a consultant). If a redesign is done without regard to SEO, it can ruin some of the search engine trust that was so hard to gain in the first place.
To save SEO efforts, it’s necessary to do the following during a site redesign:
1. Utilize 301 redirects
A website redesign involves many components and is a good time to clean up components of the site that might have gotten messy along the way. It’s possible that when the site was first set up, or even during the last redesign, that usability and best practice wasn’t considered when setting up the URL structure. If the URLs are too long or include a string of letters or digits that don’t accurately reflect the content on the page, the URLs should be updated. However, you can’t just copy over the content to a new URL and get rid of the old one. It’s the existing URL that has gained search engine trust, which you don’t want to lose. To preserve this search engine trust the existing (old) URL needs to be 301 redirected to the new corresponding URL. To ensure that some URLs don’t slip through the cracks, it’s recommended to set up a spreadsheet that lists all of the existing URLs on the site, note whether the URL is changing, and if it is- what the new corresponding URL will be. This can be given to the web developer to implement.
2. Review changing content
During a website redesign, it’s also common for a lot of the written content to be refreshed too. This revised content needs to be reviewed from an SEO perspective to ensure that relevant keywords are still included. You can look at Analytics and the previous keyword research that was conducted to see what keywords were bringing in visitors. It’s important to make sure that those keywords (if relevant) are still included in the on page content and within the meta information. If the content and purpose of the page has changed, new keyword research is necessary.
3. Password protect the testing site
During the redesign process there will be two versions of the site, one that is live and one that is in a testing environment. It’s important to make sure that the new site in the testing environment is password protected so that it can’t be crawled and indexed by the search engine spiders. You don’t want both versions of your site to appear on a search engine results page.