Redesign your Site Without Losing Search Rankings: 5 Tips

Redesign your Site Without Losing Search Rankings: 5 Tips

One of
the main reasons to redesign your website is to improve it. The last thing you
want to happen in the process, therefore, is losing search engine rankings.
Unfortunately, this is very easy to do. In fact, all top SEO companies will
tell you that without careful planning, losing search rankings after a website
redesign is almost inevitable.

So, if
you are redesigning your website this year, SEO planning for 2019 must
take equal priority as you need to do both at the same time.

How do
you make sure you don’t lose search rankings when you redesign your website?

The five
tips below will ensure Google understands your new website and how it relates
to the old one.

1. Crawl Your Existing Website

Before
jumping into planning out and redesigning your new website, you need to spend
time doing a crawl of your existing site. This is an essential step because you
need to fully understand your current site’s structure.

In
particular, you need to find out all the URLs on your existing website.

There
are free tools on the internet that will help you with this. One of the most
popular is Screaming Frog.

Once you
have this list of URLs, you need to match them up with the pages you plan to
have on your new website. You must also identify pages that will change as well
as pages you think you don’t need anymore.

2. Page to Page 301 Redirect

A 301
redirect tells Google that a URL that previously existed has now been
permanently redirected to a different website page. This is important as Google
will pass on to the new page most of the benefits generated by the old page’s
backlinks.

In
addition, 301 redirects are important for improving the user experience. This
is because users will automatically be redirected to the new URL when they
click on a link for the old one.

Therefore,
if you plan to make any changes to the URLs on your new website compared to the
old site, you need to 301 redirect the old URLs.

3. What to do with Deleted Pages

What
about deleted pages, i.e. pages on your old website you don’t think you need
any longer?

Firstly,
consider very carefully before you delete anything from the structure of your
website. Even old blogs that you think no longer have relevance might be
helping your SEO, even in a small way.

That said, there are lots of legitimate reasons for deciding a page on your old
website is no longer needed on the new website. You shouldn’t just abandon
those old URLs, though. Instead, you should add a 301 redirect to those old
URLs that redirect Google and your website’s users to a different, related page
on your website.

If you
don’t do this, the old URL will return a 404 error when Google or users try to
access it. Not only is that not a good user experience, but Google will quickly
(although not immediately) remove the URL returning a 404 from its index, and
you’ll lose all the backlink benefits along with it.

4. Handling 404s

Staying
on the topic of 404s, it’s a good idea to identify pages returning a 404 error
when doing the crawl of your existing website, as explained in tip one. You can
also check your website in Google Search Console as this will tell you the 404 pages on your website that Google has found.

Once you
identify a list of 404 pages, you should apply 301 redirects to these URLs too,
ensuring the old, non-working URL redirects a page on your new website that is
working.

Additionally,
you need to monitor 404 pages after you launch your new website. In fact, it’s
advisable to do this for at least six months. In other words, monitor Google
Search Console regularly and if you see that Google has found new 404s, fix
them quickly by adding a new 301 redirect.

5. Changes in Content

You also
need to take great care if you are changing the content on your new website.
This is common, but you need to ensure the new content doesn’t lose any keyword
optimisation.

In fact,
you should take the opportunity presented by redesigning your website to
freshen up your content and ensure it is as optimised for Google as possible.

There
are three important points to remember:

1. Make sure
   there is a target keyword for every page
2. Ensure the
   new website uses header tags properly and that keywords are included in them
3. Ensure the pages on your new website all have
   optimised page titles and meta descriptions

Getting it Right from the Start

The
above tips will all take time to action, but they are essential if you don’t
want to lose rankings in Google. Remember, losing rankings in Google results in
lost traffic and, potentially, lost revenue. Spending the time is worth it.