How do you redesign a website without losing SEO results? This is the question many business owners ask themselves when they are determined to update their current site. However, suppose your focus is on conversion rate optimization and generating more revenue for your company. In that case, it’s essential to know how to optimize a new design to perform well in search engine rankings. This post will discuss five steps for designing an effective website without sacrificing any of its SEO value!
#1 Work from a Copy of Your Original Website
To start, you should always work from a copy of your original website. This is an extremely important step in the redesign process for two reasons:
First, it ensures that there are no broken links on your new site. You don’t want to lose any potential traffic because visitors clicked on what they thought would be a link only to find themselves looking at a 404 Page Not Found error message! Second, by working with a duplicate version of your old page, you can easily compare how each performs and track the results to see which one leads more customers into conversions or sales.
Second, this allows you to make changes without affecting user experience metrics like bounce rate or conversion rates. For example, it’s widespread for websites performing well in search engines to have low bounce rates and high conversion rates, so you mustn’t do anything to ruin this trend during your redesign.
#2 Do Thorough Redirects
A redirect is a way of informing both your visitors and search engines that the location they are looking for has moved. To maintain good user experience metrics, you should do thorough redirects during this process by completing these steps:
First, update all links on pages that point to any content from your old site. Second, create a 301 permanent redirect so these old URLs automatically forward users in their browser window or tab to new locations when clicked upon in the future. Third, add an XML sitemap with every URL from your original website so Google knows where it can find everything!
To maintain good user experience metrics and keep your bounce rate down, you want to make sure that these redirects take place without causing any interruption in the flow of a visitor’s journey. Therefore, it may be necessary to complete some testing on this step before launching everything into production.
#3 Implement an Updated Sitemap
Once you have completed all redirects, it’s time to create a new sitemap so that search engines can easily find your updated content! This is important because when conducting an in-depth crawl for indexing purposes, Google often misses entire pages on websites. As a result of this missed data, these URLs may not be found by users through organic searches and could even receive less traffic than they did before the redesign was launched!
An easy way to prevent lost traffic from poor crawling results is by updating your XML sitemaps with relevant information about each URL. It should include things like page titles (which will help them rank better organically), descriptions (helpful for increasing CTR), and schema markup (helps increase engagement).
Schema markup is essential for this step because it provides Google with information about your page’s content. This includes the author, publication date, and image schema (for more accurate images in search results). The data you have here can help improve rankings by giving users an idea of how relevant the content on that particular page might be to their search. To implement an updated sitemap, you will need a crawlable copy of your new website and some basic knowledge of editing XML.
#4 Run Tests Regularly
Once you have implemented all of these steps, it’s essential to run tests regularly to ensure that everything is still working correctly. It may be necessary to complete some testing on this step before launching everything into production.
Two types of tests can be done: crawl ability and user experience metrics. Crawlability refers to how search engines discover your new web pages during their normal crawling processes (these take place automatically). User experience metrics refer to how well different pages perform with visitors after search engines have indexed them
Customer behavior analysis tools like Google Analytics & Mixpanel help companies track both of these things over time. Hence, businesses know when a redesign has affected key performance indicators for better or worse!
The steps listed above are the most important to take to maintain SEO results after a website redesign. If you don’t want your rankings to suffer, avoid doing anything that might disrupt organic traffic during this process and make sure everything is set up correctly before launching it!
