Website Redesign - Avoid SEO Disaster!

SEO disasters after a website redesign are very common. Organizations tend to lose a lot of rankings and organic search traffic after redesigning. SEO companies should take care of it.

Companies should take necessary precautions to avoid SEO disaster before redesigning their sites. Otherwise you tend to lose 60-70% of your traffic. Companies are also confused about what should be their key word and hot topics.

SEO Impact and Website Redesign:

Here are a few things you should be careful about while you are on a website redesign or CMS migration. These will help you save your already in place search engine, rankings, and traffic.

1. Crawl the Site

While redesigning the site there are high chances that your URL's will change. If so then the search engines should be immediately informed of the same. Otherwise your SEO power will get destroyed and the equity that has been built up by your old URL's will be wiped out clean. This will result in rankings getting dropped. You can use paid version of Screaming Frog or Xenu Link Sleuth to crawl your site and understand the current URL's. After crawling your site, reports that are generated should be exported and people involved in the architecture of the site should understand it. This is absolutely essential for website migration.

Your hugely important inbound links are at a risk of losing all the steam while changing your URL. To understand the link profile you have, perform an inbound links analysis. You can use Majestic SEO tools to perform the analysis and understand where the links are coming from and where on your site they are linking to. Also, use 301 Redirection to ensure that you tell the old URL’s where to redirect to. Your 301 Redirection Plan should be ready as it forms a very integral part of your redesigning and migration. All your old pages should 301 redirect to the new pages. This needs to be ensured. You cannot fail in this step. Your SEO Company should be familiar with ISAIP_Rewrite, mod_rewrite.

3. Get an SEO Audit done / analyze your site reports

SEO Audits are perhaps the most powerful deliverable in SEO activities. Having an audit done of your website, before the redesigning or migration, is indeed a very intelligent and measure move. It will help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your site. What needs to carried along and what can be essentially dropped can be decided here. You will figure out issues that need to be fixed.

Analyzing your site report will let you know your top pages, the content getting maximum clicks and views and which page is left in a lurch. You can also figure out the external links pointing to your top landing page. All these reports need to be shared during your SEO activities and migration with your SEO agency.

4. During Redesigning continue your SEO activities.

Your life is good with your ongoing sites and pages. Then suddenly you redesign your page and your ranks start dropping. The on page SEO activities have taken a backseat. You cannot afford to do so.

Your site traffic and rankings will suffer tremendously and so will your business. We sometimes, as marketers may ignore the power on-page optimization, uniquely optimized pages and keyword research in the past has on the performance of website.

There are several tools with which you can analyze your current content optimization, these include browser plugins like SEO Site Tools, etc.

5. Use Webmaster Tools!

You should always have your Webmaster account set up immediately. It must be crazy if you do not already have it. Both Google and Bing have webmaster tools, which are extremely valuable for users. These most popular webmaster tools analyzes your site, sends you direct messages if there is something wrong with your site and they can also monitor your site while you are redesigning or migrating your site

In Google Webmaster tool you can actually inform the Webmaster about your timings regarding the moving of your site.

6. Content Management Systems

Content Management System may not always be the solution you are looking for as far as SEO performance is considered. An incorrect CMS platform can lead to the crushing of the search engine rankings you have developed. So, before obtaining a CMS packages perform the analysis.

As we all know the SEO space is ever changing and we need to be in sync with the latest technologies. But beware, not to adopt latest in trend technologies blindly. A great technology might not be really great for your site or your SEO performance and search engine rankings for that matter. Some of it can actually damage the rankings which will be disaster for your site and business. So consult an SEO service expert and analyze the pros and cons before you decide on something.