Website redesigns are both exciting and scary. Exciting in the sense that you are presenting a new face to the world, and a new opportunity to show, grow and impress your website visitors… Scary in the fear that your website will not perform quite as well as the last one.

And a particularly scary part of that is SEO. Will your new website rank as well as the old one, or will the redesign have a negative impact?

The unfortunate truth is that website owners often consider SEO only once a redesign has taken place, which means that the SEO recommendations are often in conflict with the new design.

SEO needs to be considered before the designers put pen to paper. Take these 9 simple steps to make sure your new website hits the ground running with a good chance of improved rank.

1. Audit your current site

The audit should identify the positive factors of why your website ranks well for some keywords, and work out why it doesn’t rank for others. These problems can be addressed in the new design.

2. Carry out fresh keyword research

Think you know which are your highest traffic and best converting keywords? Are they just your website’s best, or are they the best in the market? Is it a high traffic term for you simply because you don’t rank well for the really high traffic terms?

A site redesign is an opportunity to refresh your target keyword list to identify new targets. Make use of:

SEM data – PPC is an invaluable data set to find out the highest traffic and highest converting words.

Google Analytics – make sure you have identified your current best keywords and phrases.

Webmaster Tools – this is a great way to find out not only which keywords sent you traffic but which keywords brought you impressions too. It might be that you are generating lots of impressions but few clicks on a keyword, simply because you rank too low. With a little boost these might be the easiest win for your website.

3. Make use of the data you find

I know that new things hold a bit of fear, and it’s often safe to stick to way things are, but the reason you’ve done a site audit and fresh keyword research is because you want to improve. So make use of the data you find.

*Does your keyword research throw up whole new categories of keywords that you hadn’t considered before? Is it worth creating new pages and content to cater for this category?
*Optimize your pages for your target keywords

Even before the designers have done their first draft, you need to have produced the optimized pages for them to slot their design into. I’m not saying that SEO takes precedent over design but unless you produce these first you’ll always be trying to slot your SEO into the designer’s framework.

4. Produce a linking structure

Your SEO optimized pages are not in isolation but need to be stitched together with a cohesive and structured links.

Optimised Internal links are often the best way to give power to your priority pages so make sure you’re consistent with your anchor text.

5. And a navigation structure

Don’t forget that your site is about visitors too. Although keyword rich anchor text might be the best signal for Google, unless it’s styled in the right graphic and positioned correctly on the page you’re going to bet letting your users down.

6. Identify your highest ranking and best performing landing page

Don’t reinvent the wheel for the sake of it. If you can identify great performing pages and the reasons for their performance, then make use of the content and structure in your new design.

7. Minimise the number of URL changes

URL structure changes can have significant and long lasting effects on your ranks. Try to keep these to a minimum, or use them to build on. Where you do need to change be meticulous in applying 301 redirects to every single one.

8. Take stock of your incoming links

Links from other websites are a key source of traffic and of course help you rank too. If you can identify some really important ones that lead to pages where you a implementing a 301, consider contacting those sites and asking them to modify the destination of their link.

9. Set up a customised 404 page before launch

This is vital. Anyone clicking on search based links to pages that have been redirected may well end up on a 404 – the last thing you want is to lose them.

That’s it

If you’re considering a site redesign then make sure SEO is taken into account before, during, and after the design team get to work. For more in depth advice get in touch.

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