SEO and Web Redesign-All You Need to Know

February 10, 2017

SEO and Website redesign must always go hand-in-hand. Best SEO website redesigning company in India can give your website desired page ranking on Google along with boosting your sales and revenue.

Making a website design update essentially means that your business is growing. A fresh look is necessary for every growing business. Congratulations! You are now probably looking out for the best website redesigning company in India to give your business the freshness it needs. But that said, there are so many important things to keep in mind before redesigning and revamping your website.

A website is the business’ face. It is the first thing a customer would remember about your brand. So essentially even when a company plans to redesign the website, there are certain things it can’t afford to let change. SEO is one of that. SEO & Website Redesign should mostly go hand in hand to ensure that the transition is fruitful and productive. Making website SEO friendly must always be the prime focus for any business, both big and small.

SEO is a vital part of any business. There is no denying the fact that a significant chunk of your business depends mainly on how well your SEO strategy is. If that is the case for an existing website, think of the consequences bad SEO will have on a redesigned website.

As much as we would like to believe, the new design is not going to carry forward all the hard work that the SEO expert would have done, and things can take a pretty bad shape if they are not planned carefully before redesigning the website.

The risk of SEO being depletedis limited to the extent of change the business is looking to bring about on their website. A minor update or a change in the design of the website will not cause any significant SEO disasters, but anything more than that involving the URLs or its navigation would bring about tremendous changes to the SEO quotient. In such cases, it is essential to keep a check on whether there is a possibility to crawl the website and enable the search engine spiders to find the content. A domain change can make the entire process even more complicated and challenging and mayoften result in a drastic fall in online traffic.

Now let us see what the impact of SEO is on a redesigned business website.

Image Source

Importance of SEO in Web Redesign

There are so many fascinating infographics available online explaining how search engines work. It gives clarity on why this optimization is necessary after a website redesign and how the web traffic will be drastically impacted by avoiding it. Let us break it up for everyone to understand it better.

Image Source

Redirecting URLs to the New Web Page

While a business redesigns a website, the management or the website redesign services agency needs to have a list of all the URLs which were driving the significant chunk of traffic to the website. This information can be acquired easily via the Google Analytics. To ensure that the traffic does not get lost, there must be a 301 redirect to the new equivalent page. The business needs to properly strategize to make sure that there is no decline in traffic of the redesigned website. Losing web traffic could cost a lot of money to businesses both small and big. Some experts believe a phased approach is a better way to manage SEO and a smarter way to redesign the website without having to face any major glitches during the transition.

This makes a lot of sense as this would mean that the search engine bots crawl a relatively smaller section of the web site, hence making the transition smoother. Management can even keep a track on how the things move and remove any unwanted problems with ease.

Link-Building

High-authority link-building is very significant for a redesigned website as it enables the search engines to identify the transition quickly. Such link-building require a well strategized and solid marketing plan even before starting the redesigning process. Spreading the word out about the redesign and keeping the audience focused on it is very essential. Online contests, social media countdown, a small notification via email, anything can be linked to the website relaunch to ensure link-building.

Image Source

Noindex Tags

This is an imperative thing to check when redesigning your website. Often it so happens that while redesigning a website, Google starts segregating particular content as duplicates and the business might have to pay penalties for that. To prevent this, a no-index tag needs to be embedded on the website that is being developed. This would ensure that the search engine bot doesn’t index pages or content till the web page is completely designed and ready to be launched. This is especially important in case the redesign is only accurate to the visual appearance of the website and doesn’t alter the content. Indexing duplicate edition of the same content can make the removal of all the duplicate pages a very laborious and time-consuming process.

Making an SEO-friendly redesign is a huge responsibility for any business and the website redesign services agency which is responsible for designing it. It is thus paramount to have a track of it during such a major business transition.

While the firm is gaining a new avatar, it is also important that the transition gets noticed and impacts the business. There are so many things that can go wrong during this process. Some of the most common ones are- incomplete or missing page titles, H1 header tags and missing alt text for images. Also, one might find a lot of duplicate content, tags, and headers tags during the process.

All these can significantly affect the SERP ranking of the site, bringing down the traffic drastically. Most of the optimization which was done prior to the redesigning is lost, and the new website has only a scaled down version of the optimization.

Using crawler tools to analyze any optimization errors that may have been missed during the process of redesigning will help businesses in identifying and rectifying potential SEO issues before it backfires on the business.