Avoid Sabotaging Your SEO Plans with These Redesigning Errors

Website redesigning can sabotage your SEO strategy. Here are some considerations that you need to remember when redesigning your website.

After going through a website redesigning session back at your company, if you find that your company’s hard-earned SEO ranking is messed up, do not blame your online marketing agency. Website redesigns are definitely not a bad step to go forward with but, is seriously a step that needs caution before execution.

Most of the companies today are bent on redesigning their website almost every year to keep up with the contemporary trends. Now, dabbling with a few exiting color trends and schemes is not a big deal and barely has severe impacts. But, if you are thinking of a full-scale redesign for your website, you better be careful. The content as well the architecture of the websites is overhauled by website designing and development.

The relationship between website redesign and seo is not that pleasant as per the statistics. Sabotaging SEO rankings as a result of website redesigning is one of the worst nightmares to any digital marketer. Redesigns can have massive inverse impacts on search engine rankings and consequently the traffic. To be very honest, the results are pretty ugly.

Without further ado, going forward with the tips that can help you avoid the SEO ranking shocks after a redesign:

First things first, always consider the SEO:

It is seen too often that companies, during their website redesign planning, forget to take the SEO impact into account when it should actually be their primary concern in this case. All the URL’s get changed without the old ones getting redirected and there is also a major loss of valuable content from the historical pages as a result of a website redesign. Companies do not understand the credibility that the URL’s hold and neither do they understand the mechanism of Google et al. in this case. Well, it’s not a crime to not know this. But, this certainly happens.

Site Structure:

One of the crucial aspects of SEO is the manner in which the website is laid out, in short, the site structure. Beware of the most common mistakes that people generally commit while redesigning their website- it is of minimizing the number of web pages. If you want to get rid of pages that include thin content, it is best to do so by keeping them and setting up 301 redirects to send the customers directly to the new and improved web pages.

Back-links:

You may not be aware of this that backlinks act as a lifeline to your website SEO. It is through the backlinks that Google recognizes your website to be important, relevant & respected by other sites. But, the moment you redesign your website, the backlinks from other sites to your websites will most definitely lead to the ‘404 Page Not Found’ errors. It occurs because naturally other webmasters go through their links manually to point it to your new site. This will directly hit negatively to the user’s experience and inevitably pulls down search rankings.

Nonetheless, you can better the situation and improve seo rankings. The solution to this issue can be achieved by the site structure guidelines while redesigning. All the old pages must have a 301 redirect that is permanent. Finding all the 404 errors becomes impossible manually. So, use the Google Webmaster Tool and web analytics to find them and keep correcting one by one.

On and Off Page SEO:

Both of these also remain important after a redesign.

Here’s what you need to do for on-page seo. First of all, audit the pages that you’ll keep paying special attention to the content of the page including Meta descriptions, headers, and title tags. Secondly, put authoritative content that is 100mpercent high on the relevant keywords that can get you the search engine rankings while you create the new pages. Finally, ensure that the structure of the internal link is easy to flow, clear and logical as well.

Not much of the off-page seo factors are in your control but, it can be taken care off as it did when you managed it for the old website. Off-page SEO is basically factors that indicate to Google that your website is worth visiting. Here, you need to deeply concentrate on the content that can make people eager to share, provide social sharing buttons to make it easier for them to share your content and create headlines with an interesting bend to convince visitors to click on ‘Continue Reading’ button.

Change in the Domain:

This is a big hurt on your Seo rankings i.e. changing your website domain.  Now, as a part of seo maintenance plan, while you redesign, you need to strategize well. Companies usually do not migrate the old website to the new one at one go. This automatically leads to the presence of similar content in two places as a result of which search engines catch only the original content and ignore the new duplicate pages. This glitch severely hampers the search engine rankings of your website when you redesign.

How do you deal with this problem? Ideally, SEO experts recommend the use of “noindex” meta tag to hide the new website that is still under construction, until the moment that you’re ready for a complete switch. In order to maintain your webpage rankings during the migration process, you need to make sure that you 301 redirect the old WebPages to the new ones onto the new web domain.  

Get rid of the Duplicate pages:

If at any standpoint the duplicate web pages cease to be useful, then you are better off using a 301 redirect to make the traffic land on the correct page. This method also becomes useful for the search engines to rank your website and ultimately comes to your SEO benefit. After all, duplicate content can have serious impacts on a websites SEO. Well, there may also be instances when you might need to keep the duplicate pages. In that case, to explicitly notify Google on which page to rank in the search results, use the rel=”canonical” tag.

Changing the look and feel of your websites through a redesign is great. You must know that SEO is never affected by minor aspects as site color schemes and themes. But, major page layout alterations can have an adverse impact.