Redesigning a website or migrating to a new CMS involves a lot of planning and execution.
When done right, a website redesign will make it easier for users to navigate and improve user experience with a refreshed look, various new features.
BUT it can also be an SEO disaster if you don’t take precautions to safeguard SEO.
For marketers, we all know that SEO is an important online strategy. But do we understand its role during website redesign? Here are why you should take SEO into account when redesigning your site.
1. Best time to rethink your SEO
During website revamp, you have the flexibility to reconsider the entire website structure, every piece of content, and page element. This is a good time to review and evaluate what worked and did not worked.
In the process, you can better evaluate what site features, on-page elements, and content pieces are important to have on your new website.
This helps unleash your website’s SEO potentials and further improve your site ranking.
2. Minimize ranking loss during migration
Your website may risk losing its rankings or traffic if the migration is not planned properly. But with good planning, the website SEO can improve even further.
If your website is ranking well on the search engine, with thousands of organic traffic each month, it is important to preserve existing SEO elements and ensure these best practices can be followed in the new site.
By carrying out detailed analysis on existing website and webpage levels, we can identify important site and page elements with high SEO value. With proper execution plans, we ensure these elements are migrated to the new site, safeguarding SEO throughout the process.
3. Avoid losing traffic
A website migration plan should consider SEO thoroughly with a clear action plan.
For example, launching your redesigned site without any redirects can cause a very poor user experience. When a user lands on an error 404 page, he/she might give up browsing your site and turn to your competitors’ website right away. This could be a significant loss in traffic, leads, and sales to your business.
For a large scale website, you should hire an SEO consultancy to work with your internal team and web design agency to ensure risk-free website migration.
4. Get a built-in SEO foundation in your design
A healthy website structure sets an important foundation for its SEO to grow continuously and sustain. Before proceeding to build the new design, you should get SEO consultancy to study the proposed website structure and page elements.
This is an important step to ensure that the new design has a healthy website structure to support ongoing website development and traffic growth.
5. Balance design, UX, and SEO
A redesign does not only change the look of your site, but also affects user experience. Besides font style, graphics and colours, there’re a lot more to consider.
After all, you want your site to be easily found by users on Google. And you also want your site to be easy to navigate and convert visitors to customers.
So you should also make your website friendly to users and search engines, taking into account the keywords, content, and features adopted in your website.
Many website design companies specialize in designing and developing websites and won’t include SEO. Hiring an SEO consultancy to work with your website developers can help ensure an optimized website redesign and migration.
At Aloha, we operate as a 3rd party SEO consultant to marketers – collaborating with both marketers and their website designers throughout the entire website revamp journey to ensure best-in-class SEO practices are adhered to.
From planning, to launch and post-launch stage, we investigate various aspects of your website including website architecture, SEO application, UX, layout, and content.
Don’t hesitate to talk to us today if you need help with your website redesign or revamp plan.
