The website design is important as the trends are changing rapidly. Imagine coming across an old website that seems prehistoric now.
What would you think?
Would you even want to consider going back to it? – the answer is probably a no.
Not only the website redesign will boost your conversion rate but it will also maximize the user experience, along with many other aspects of your website and by extension, your business. That being said, revamping your website also poses a risk to your search engine rankings.
Redesigning Website
Web redesign mostly alters a lot of aspects of the website. For instance, you can move to remove or add certain content, change or alter the domain name, or even go for adding in newer features to your website. Most of these changes will affect your SEO, and even a single one of the aforementioned changes can be bad for your website rankings.
The good news however is, you can minimize the harm of a web redesign. The most crucial things is to have a strategy and a holistic plan in place. This is why (insert brand name) has created this SEO checklist, which includes;
- Explore your current website
- Accumulate your performing content
- Looks for ways to avoid disaster
- Optimize the existing content
- 301 redirects for organization purposes
- Indulge in speed
Let’s look into the Ultimate Website Redesign SEO Checklist for 2022, designed to improve your website without harming your SEO effort and web rankings.
Explore your Current Site
One must rediscover their entire website before going in for a redesign.
The major thing that will hurt your website keywords is the change. It is why we recommend checking the website’s performance. This check-in must include essential keywords, time spent by user on your website, bounce rate, number of visitors, along with sales numbers. After checking in how your website is performing in terms of SEO, you can start getting rid of things that are hurting your SEO while keeping the ones that are performing.
Pro-Tip:
Work on the design of your website for both laptopand desktop user interfaces – other than the SEO, what most laptop and desktops users want is a perfect visual on their screens, that is aesthetically pleasing.
Accumulation of Performing Content
This step is important.
It is essential to not know how you will be changing your content, or the more so if that content is performing well. Go through your content to pick and choose which segments are performing well. Check for visitor numbers, review related keywords, and check out the search engine rankings of these well performing pages.
Little to no changes to these pages are recommended – as these well performing pages will preserve your website.
Avoiding Disaster
We know we have emphasized the importance of content preservation – however improving your SEO is more important. Many search engines iterate their standards of quality when it comes to checking your website for raking. Thus it is advisable to aim for quality rather than preservation of content.
301 Redirects
On the website some pages are expected to be removed. However, if the search engine crawlers or visitors are directed to old pages, then it will affect your site. For keeping it organized, you can set up 301 redirects for existing pages.
Archiving pages is another option – but most of the time it is better to redirect to a new page that has the same or at least similar keywords which are performing well for your website. These redirects make sure that anyone coming across the old pages that you want to remove, gets redirected to the new and redesigned pages. This alone makes redirecting one of the most important factors of the ultimate website redesign SEO checklist for 2022.
Importance of Speed
The Internet today is extremely fast – so should be your website pages.
Most of the internet users expect the web pages to load instantly. A smaller change in your website loading speed might not change the user experience by a long shot. But the search engines give paramount importance to speed. Additionally, the search engines also factor in the speed for ranking your website.
For improving the webpage’s speed, you can compress files, work on the code, minify, or add in a content distribution network. All of this will help your website by making it lighter and easier to load, and essentially making it faster. The improved speed will reward you with improved rankings as the search engines value and factor in the speed.
This brings us to the end of The Ultimate Website Redesign SEO Checklist for 2022.
Now is the time for;
Redesigning the Website
After finalizing a list of pages your want to keep and pages that you intend to remove, it is time to rebuild your website. In this process updating your website architecture is crucial, as updating the architecture will aid the search engine crawlers to find your website easily, while also letting the crawlers understand better the relationship between the different webpages.
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