On occasion, you will find that the only way for your company to move forward is to completely redesign your website. This may be because your old website hasn’t been updated in a number of years, or because you have added new products or services to your repertoire, or you have changed your company’s name. Unfortunately, redesigning your website is likely to wreak havoc with your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
Use these tips to help minimize the effects of the redesign to your SEO strategy as much as possible:
Create a 301-redirection plan
This can help you to pass on your old website’s page rank to its equivalent page on your new website. If you don’t do this, you can kiss your page rank, and your SEO efforts, down the drain. In order to get any sort of success, you’ll need to re-begin your SEO strategy from scratch.
Analyze your links
When your website is redesigned, a lot of things will change. Some of these things you will see and others you won’t. One change that you may not see is your website’s URL structure. Get a site crawler to index your website (much like Google’s spiders do) and decide whether your structures are still working well or not.
Conduct an SEO audit
This can be done using a web analytics tool, which will show you which pages of your website are visited the most, where your traffic is coming from, and so on. After working out the strengths and weaknesses of your site, you can tweak your SEO strategy to make the most of your strengths and to improve your weaknesses.
Tell the search engines that you are moving
By having a webmaster tool on your side, you will be able to tell the search engines that you are changing domains. This webmaster tool can also help you to ascertain whether the migration of your website has been successful or not.
Don’t stop your SEO strategy
redesigning your website is a time for you to double your SEO efforts if anything. It also presents a great opportunity for you to go through your website piece by piece to see whether any over and under optimization has occurred.
Do not be put off redesigning your website because you are worried what the changes will mean for your SEO. Instead, go ahead with the redesign and take the above tips onboard to ensure that your SEO strategy continues to work and you can take help of a SEO company, even when you have changed domains or have made some drastic changes to your existing website.
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