Redesigning a Website Without Losing SEO

1. Website Revamping and SEO

This is something that every website owner dreads more than anything else – the task of redesigning a website while maintaining the delicate balance of your online presence.

The risks of losing customers, website information, and important search engine rankings are genuine. They can have long-term consequences for the business’s bottom line. However, a web design company can help you out in this regard.

However, there are some things you can do to lessen the impact on your business.

2. Things To Keep In Mind If Your Goal is Redesigning a Website Without Losing SEO

2.1 Monitor Every Aspect

It is the important one. You could make a huge mistake and not realize something is wrong until it’s far too late—or at least not without a massive effort.

You can save much hassle if you monitor everything from the start. This is why the recommendation is to seek the assistance of an experienced web design company, as they are accustomed to encountering these projects every day.

Invest in SEO monitoring tools as soon as you decide to redesign. A website design company usually keeps an eye on all key SEO metrics to detect signs of a disturbance in the force. Keep an eye on the following:

• Rankings for keywords
• Search engine organic traffic
• Number of backlinks in total
• Alexa Domain Authority Score for Global Rank Speed Spam
• Flow of Trust/Flow of Citation
• Safety (free of spam, viruses, and malware) (free of spam, viruses, and malware)

2.2 Never Work On a Live Website

This is the most crucial thing to remember when making changes to your website. Please keep your website the same while it is live. A reputable website design company India will also recommend the same.

Disable the website while you make improvements (not recommended because visitors will be frustrated), or set up the new website on a separate domain and swap it with the original when finished (this is the recommended method).

Making changes to a website is often lengthy, and mistakes are unavoidable, so avoiding dealing with the issues that come with working on a live website is preferable.

2.3 Compare the Layouts of the Old and New Websites

Customers prefer familiarity, so drastically altering the structure of your website when redesigning it is not a good idea, and a leading website design company understands this very well. Before you begin working on a new design, use a crawler to map out your existing website’s layout so that you can match the new website to it. After redesigning the website, crawl it to compare its structure to the original.

2.4 Keep The Original Website Data

Create a list of all the pages from the old website to maintain consistency between the two. If the URLs for pages on the new website change, you must notify search engines about the changes using 301 redirects. Failure to do so will harm your rankings and customer trust and cause you to lose organic traffic to your website. You should also save the original website’s sitemap to a text file for future reference.

2.5 Use a Temporary URL for the New Website

This is how you avoid disruption from the old to the new website. Create a temporary URL for your new website and copy your old webpage there. Then, make any changes you want. Make sure to noindex this temporary URL because you want it to appear in search engine results once the new website is ready to go live. When you’re finished with the new website, change the domain name and publish it.

2.6 Make Use of 301 Redirections

You must use 301 redirects on all pages of your previous website. The 301 redirect informs search engines that the URL of a specific page has changed, ensuring that website visitors can find what they are looking for. The 301 redirect also ensures that all bookmarks and social media links to the original website remain functional after the new website goes live. Ensure that each page’s 301 redirect points to the same content on the new website when you set up the 301 redirects. If that isn’t possible for every page, ensure the content linked to it is similar. Make a general redirect that points all old pages to the new website’s home page. Else it will irritate website visitors. So keep this in mind when offering website design services like revamping.

2.7 Use Effective 404 Pages

The 404 page not found message is essential to any website redesign because pages can get lost in the shuffle, or links can break. A good 404 page will assist users and search engines return to the information they are looking for or another location on your website. Including a search engine box on the 404 page makes it user- and search-engine-friendly. You can also keep the website’s menu on the 404 page.

2.8 Maintain a Record of Backlinks

Every website owner is concerned about losing all of their hard-earned links. You can collect backlink usage statistics, and the best way to move those backlinks to your new website is to contact the owners of the most popular backlinks and request that the links be changed to point to the new pages. If that isn’t possible, ensure the pages with the remaining backlinks have 301 redirects.

3. Details to Be Addressed Before Going Live

After you’ve finished redesigning your website, there are still a few details to work out before you can go live, regarding which you can talk to a web design company. Use meta descriptions and compress images for faster loading to optimize the new images for SEO. Check the robots.txt file to ensure that it is correctly configured to allow access to search engine crawlers. Crawlers can only read your website if it is configured correctly. Look for broken links on the new website.

Log in to Google Webmaster Tools and confirm that the new website has been verified. Then, use FETCH AS GOOGLE to ensure that the new website can be read correctly. FETCH AND RENDER, then SUBMIT TO INDEX the website and all its linked URLs to Google. A web crawler should also be used to map the structure of the new website and compare it to the original website. The sitemap of your redesigned website should be submitted to search engines, which will aid in the indexing of the new website.

4. Post the New Website Goes Live

When your redesigned website is live, compare your bounce rates before and after the redesign. An increase in the bounce rate indicates that users are dissatisfied with something about the redesign, and you may need to make changes. Continue to monitor your search engine rankings for any improvement or decline. Google recommends a transition period of at least 180 days, during which you should retain your old domain name and use 301 redirects.

The transition from your original website to a redesigned version is always tricky. However, following these suggestions can make offering such website design services easier and reduce disruption to your business.

5. Summing Up

However challenging it might seem, a top-notch web design company India such as Matebiz Pvt. Ltd., can handle your website redesign while ensuring that it doesn’t hamper your SEO. We offer website design services that meet your exact expectations. But also being an experienced SEO Company India, we understand the value SEO Services bring to a business and its prosperity.

Offering impeccable website design services and taking care of your online visibility requires immense expertise, which makes us the website design company you can rely on.

As a top Digital marketing company in India, we offer super Affordable SEO packages as we believe creativity can co-exist with affordability. We have proved this to many of our clients.