When you think of a website redesign, you might think of new branding, a new layout of your website, or new offerings. While all these aspects of a brand are important, SEO plays a big role, too.
With every website redesign project, we start by considering the SEO goals for each page and the website as a whole. We design websites that perfectly combine a beautiful modern website with the latest website SEO tactics.
This blog will show you the website redesign SEO checklist we use when building new websites for our clients. If you or a client will be redesigning your website soon, keep this website design checklist handy!
The Importance of SEO in a Website Redesign
A well-planned redesign can boost search rankings and drive traffic. There are some SEO strategies to consider to make the most of your investment.
Preserving Current Rankings
If you’re redesigning your website, you already have a website that you will either be updating or moving to a new platform (Showit, WordPress, Squarespace, etc.) Anytime you update your website, you must prioritize preserving your current SEO rankings. Depending on whether you’re keeping your domain or changing it, there’s a risk of losing the search engine rankings you’ve worked hard to achieve. A well-planned SEO strategy ensures that your site’s authority and traffic are preserved.
Leveraging New SEO Opportunities
A redesign is a perfect opportunity to update your keyword strategy. Integrate high-value keywords into your new site’s content, metadata, and headers to boost relevance and ranking. You might also be refreshing and optimizing content on your website during the redesign. High-quality, relevant content that meets user needs can significantly improve your search visibility. I always recommend clients invest in a blog strategy to help their rankings. Especially as you relaunch with a new website, you want to reestablish your trustworthiness with search engines.
Aligning with Current SEO Best Practices
When was the last time you updated your website before this redesign? The SEO strategies you implemented when you first launched have probably changed. Take this opportunity to align your site with the latest SEO trends and guidelines, ensuring long-term competitiveness and success.
Alright, let’s get into the website redesign SEO checklist you’ve been waiting for!
1. Pre-Redesign Preparation
Before we start making changes to your current website, we need to prepare for the redesign. This involves auditing your current website, goal setting, competitor analysis, and setting benchmark metrics.
Audit Your Current Site
First, we want to look at how your current website is functioning. Use tools like Google Analytics and Search Console to understand current performance.
These are some areas you want to identify in your audit:
- Top-performing pages
- Keywords you rank for
- Traffic sources
- Broken links
- Indexing issues
- Site speed
- Mobile-friendliness
These metrics will help you redesign your website to maintain and improve your current SEO rankings while creating a better user experience.
Set Clear Goals
Next in our website redesign SEO checklist, set clear SEO goals for your new website. Define what you want to achieve with the redesign. These are some ideas:
- Better user experience
- Higher conversion rates
- More organic website traffic
- Reduce bounce rate
- Improve domain authority
Align these goals with your overall business objectives. Review your progress on these goals every few months and adjust your strategy as needed.
Competitor Analysis
Your competitors play a role in how well your website will rank on search engines. Analyze competitors’ websites to identify their strengths and weaknesses. You may be able to capitalize on the gaps of your competitors. Also, note the successful strategies they’ve implemented. While you never want to copy an SEO strategy, you can take bits and pieces to test for yourself.
Benchmark Metrics
Again, aligning with your goals, calculate benchmark metrics you want to measure and achieve. Record your current SEO metrics and compare them to post-redesign performance to see how you’ve improved. I suggest reviewing your analytics one, three, and six months after your redesign. If your SEO metrics haven’t improved after six months, you may need to revisit your SEO strategy.
2. SEO-Focused Design Planning
Now, we get into the SEO-focused design planning phase. This is where we’ll plan your site architecture, mobile responsive design, URL structure, and user experience.
Site Architecture
Site architecture is the way your website is structured and organized to assist with easy navigation, usability, and search engine crawling and indexing. Plan a clear, logical structure with easy navigation to assist users and search engines with finding what they’re looking for. Ensure important pages are accessible within a few clicks and include links to other pages where appropriate. The goal of this step is to help you plan a strategy and journey through your website for a user.
Mobile Responsiveness
Mobile responsiveness is required nowadays. According to Semrush, 63% of searches occur on mobile devices in the U.S. Design for mobile-first searching to ensure a seamless experience across devices. This means optimizing copy, images, and navigation to scale to the size of a mobile screen vs a desktop computer. How annoying is it when you have to zoom out to an unreadable size to see the entire page of a website on a mobile device? It should scale seamlessly to accommodate mobile devices.
URL Structure
A well-structured URL helps users understand the content of a page before visiting it. It plays a role in SEO by providing search engines with clues about the page’s topic and relevance. Create SEO-friendly URLs that are concise and descriptive. It typically defaults to the name of the page – your services page would be /services, a blog would be /title-of-the-blog, etc. However, we recommend editing URLs to include keywords where natural and shorten them as much as you can.
Don’t forget to plan redirects from old URLs to new ones to avoid broken links. Redirects forward the traffic from the old URL to the new one. Not addressing broken links will hurt your SEO rankings. Use Broken Link Check throughout the redesign process and every few months afterward to make sure you don’t have any broken links on your website.
User Experience (UX)
User experience should be your number one priority. However, it’s not just because we want humans to enjoy their experience. We also need search engines to know the site will serve user needs.
Search engines care about providing the best experience to users by giving them relevant search results. If people bounce off your site quickly after landing on it, search engines won’t show your pages as often because you aren’t providing a good experience for users. Prioritize fast loading times and intuitive navigation, and implement clear calls-to-action and easy-to-read content.
There’s a lot of planning involved in this website redesign SEO checklist but it will help you optimize your website for success.
3. Content Strategy
Let’s chat about your content strategy. This includes identifying all your current content, doing keyword research, and optimizing the content. This includes website pages, blogs, podcast show notes, freebies, etc. Your website hosts a lot of content to go through!
Content Inventory
First, list all existing content and evaluate its performance. Check it against Google Analytics and Google Search Console to see how much traffic it brings you. Then, decide to keep, update, or remove it from your new website. Some content may no longer be relevant to your new website, and that’s okay. It’s better to remove it than to confuse users and search engines.
You may also notice gaps in your content. Make an additional list of pages you want to create to meet the needs of your audience. These are some ideas of pages you might consider adding:
- Resources
- Blog content
- Newsletter subscription
- Case studies
- FAQ
- Job openings
Keyword Research
Once you have the list of content you want to keep or update, conduct thorough keyword research to find relevant keywords to target. Use a mix of short-tail and long-tail keywords relevant to your business. Short tail keywords are more broad and will likely be used on main web pages. Long tail keywords are niche and specific so they will most likely be used within content like blogs. Identify the keyword you want to target for each page on your website.
Content Optimization
Now, it’s time to optimize your content. Use one target keyword for each page to edit on-page elements, such as titles, meta descriptions, headers, and image alt text. Sometimes, the text and images may need to be edited, too. Ensure all your content is engaging, informative, and aligned with your audience’s needs.
4. Technical SEO Considerations
Did you just read ‘technical’ and get a little scared? Don’t worry, we’ll walk you through each step of technical SEO, like page speed optimization, schema markup, XML sitemap, and 404 pages.
Page Speed Optimization
The ideal page loading time is 0-3 seconds. Anything above three seconds increases the chances of someone leaving your website because it’s taking too long to load. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify speed issues. You may need to implement fixes such as image compression, code minification, and video optimization to improve your page speed.
Schema Markup
Schema markup is a form of code you can add to your website’s HTML to help search engines understand the content on your web pages more effectively. Add structured data to enhance search engine understanding of your content. This can improve your chances of appearing in relevant search results, and it may also increase click-through rates by providing more compelling information to users.
XML Sitemap and Robots.txt
An XML Sitemap is a file that lists all the URLs of your website that you want search engines to know about and index. Create and submit an XML sitemap in Google Search Console. It’s important to keep your XML Sitemap updated whenever you add, remove, or significantly modify pages on your website to ensure search engines have the most current information about your site’s content.
Also, ensure your robots.txt file is correctly configured to allow search engine crawling. Robots.txt allows you to control how search engines and other web robots interact with your site. It can prevent certain pages from being crawled, which can be useful for pages with sensitive information or duplicate content.
404 Pages and Redirects
If a page cannot be found on a website, it goes to a 404 page. Most websites will have a generic 404 page, but you can create a better user experience by designing a custom 404 page to guide users back to the main site or other relevant pages. You should also implement 301 redirects from old URLs to new ones to maintain link equity. When you’re editing URLs, it’s important to double-check for broken links again to ensure pages are being redirected correctly.
5. Post-Launch Activities
We’ve made it to the website launch period! You’ve done a lot of work so far, but your job isn’t finished yet. It’s time to monitor performance, fix issues, and continually improve.
Monitor Performance
Use Google Analytics and Search Console to track performance. Remember, do this one, three, and six months after your website relaunch. Compare post-launch metrics with benchmarks to assess improvements in your data.
Fix Issues
You might have more SEO issues than normal after a website relaunch, and that’s okay. Just make sure to fix them quickly. Regularly check for and fix any broken links or crawl errors to make sure your website is appearing in search results.
Continuous Improvement
Everything in business requires continuous improvement, and your website is no different. Continuously update and optimize content based on performance data. Stay informed about SEO best practices and algorithm changes and make updates when needed. Your website is your digital storefront; keep it in tip-top shape for visitors!
Wrapping Up Your Website Redesign SEO Checklist
Whew, that was a lot to cover! A redesign is a big project, but we hope this website redesign SEO checklist helps you understand the SEO side of your website. It’s so important to integrate SEO into your redesign process. It’s how your website will be found on search engines by new users and potential customers. Make sure they can find you.
Follow this website redesign SEO checklist to maximize your website’s potential. If you’re ready for a complete website redesign overhaul, contact us today! Our Website with Integrated SEO package might be just what you need to have a beautiful website that’s optimized for users and search engines. Book a call to get started!
