Introduction
- Are you planning to redesign your company website to make it more attractive?
- Have you taken into consideration important factors regarding SEO for the redesign process?
- Do you know how an incomplete SEO in the new redesign can lead to a dip in performance?
- Are you aware how you can integrate performance as well as good design in your website?
Everyone wants to go in for a website redesign after a couple of years. All of us crave for our company website to be attractive looking. However, in the quest for looks and attraction, we often fail to pay attention to something crucial.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)!
In this article, we will help people by making them understand why an updated SEO is important for your redesign. We will also help everyone with an easy SEO checklist for website redesign.
SEO Checklist for Website Redesign: The List
1. Update your Keyword Research and create Website Content-
A website redesign also involves updating the content on your website. The first task to do is update all your keywords according to volume and search difficulty. Use a proper keyword tool to do your research, create content for your home, and service pages accordingly.
This is a very important step, as you would be building your backlink profile based on the keywords on your website pages. You can go for Google Keywords Planner or any other paid tool that helps you.
Pro Tip- Pay attention to Long Tail Keywords and factor them into the content as well.
2. Site Structure and URL arrangement-
Google and other search engines pay particular attention to the site structure and your URL arrangement. Over time, with too much content and pages, the structure becomes confusing. URLs too stretch out to ten plus words.
It is important that you align these factors doing the redesign process. Arrange the URL structures into different folders so that indexing becomes a breeze. Please borrow from your keyword research and create additional sections for high volume searches.
Pro Tip- Ensure that your targeted keyword of a page finds mention in your URL structure.
3. Focus on the 301 Redirect at all times-
A common mistake done by many, a 301 redirect is necessary when you have new URLs as well as old URLs. If you are done with the above two steps, now would be a good time to concentrate on your 301 redirects.
Every 404 Error on your website is a vote down in the eyes of search engines. Hence, it is important to match your new and old URLs and create the appropriate redirects. While this may seem elementary, most of us fail to execute this.
Pro Tip- Create an Excel and match the Old and New URLs side by side. This will ease the process and remove any errors.
4. Accelerate Page Loading Speed and Concentrate on Mobile Optimization-
These two On-Page SEO factors are crucial when it comes to improving performance. The only thing Google hates more than duplicate content is a slow page loading speed. If you have a high bounce rate, you can never hope to rank.
You would have heard about Google announcing a Mobile First Indexing Policy some time back. This is because 70% of all searches take place on a mobile device. It is important that you attention to speed and mobile responsiveness during your redesign process.
Pro Tip- Why not try creating a mobile version of your site first and then adapting it to the desktop?
5. Image and Video Optimization during the redesign process-
Images and videos are necessary to impart a specific look and feel to a website. Some businesses have to be visually heavy in order to appeal to their target audiences. However, videos and images make the website heavy leading to slow loading speeds.
It is important that you use an image and video optimizer to compress both these entities. Reduce the file size to increase page-loading speed. It is also important that you add ‘Alt Text’ to all images and videos for increased search performance.
Pro Tip- Optimize images from the Desktop version of your website against doing it in the mobile version.
Conclusion
A great looking website without SEO optimization is not going to serve the interests of your organization. You need both of them to fire at all cylinders if you are looking to reap the benefits of search. In this article, we have tried to list some of the major SEO checklist points you can do during your website redesign project.
For a more detailed analysis on website redesign and SEO, you can visit Digitrio.
