SEO and website redesign: 9 steps to protect your rankings.

The average website lifespan is just two years and seven months. And while there are ways to extend the life of your website, sooner or later you’ll need a site redesign.

A redesign brings your site up-to-date. It ensures your website visuals, layouts and functionality continue to provide the best possible user experience.

But what about website redesign SEO?

To ensure your site maintains its position in search engine result pages (SERPs), you need to pay close attention to SEO when redesigning a website.

You need to take a scientific approach, carefully refreshing a site without undoing all the hard work it took to build a strong online presence. Get it wrong, and it can take months or even years to recover your rankings.

So here, we look at the fundamental SEO rules you should be following when redesigning a website. We’ll also be going through a step-by-step website redesign SEO checklist.

SEO and website redesign: four fundamental rules to follow

Before you get started with our website redesign SEO checklist, take a look at these basic site redesign SEO rules.

Start by learning about website redesign SEO risks

Things that can cause problems for your SEO when redesigning a website include:

• Changing, moving or removing content and keywords
• Changing URLs, which leads to broken links
• Changing or removing internal links
• Creating a poor user experience
• Introducing new technical issues

Understanding the basics of SEO web design and the risks involved in a site refresh can help you approach things with caution and make better redesign decisions. With these risks in mind, you’ll only make changes to pages that are performing well in SERPs if those changes are absolutely necessary.

Monitor everything

You need to monitor website performance in detail — before and after your redesign.

This helps you understand your baseline website performance. And — by keeping a close eye on website changes and the results of each action — you can see if rankings are slipping and step in to correct any SEO errors quickly.

So what should you be monitoring? The most important things to look at when managing website redesign SEO include:

• Organic traffic
• Keyword rankings
• Backlink profile
• Loading speeds
• Site security
• Inventory of your pages
• Site structure

There will inevitably be some fluctuations in rankings after a website redesign and a slight dip in traffic is normal. But you should be back at baseline within a couple of months — if not sooner.

Keep things familiar

If you’re a well-established brand with a well-established website, don’t be tempted to change more than is necessary. Loyal customers may find it jarring to load your site and find it changed beyond recognition. This can harm your user experience and — as a result — your SERP rankings.

You can, of course, make changes to website structure, layout and appearance. But make changes with care, so things feel consistent and familiar for customers. That might mean choosing a site structure that customers recognise and already know how to navigate.

Avoid working on live websites

Unless you’re making minor changes, avoid working on a website while it’s live. If you alter a live site, everything you do is visible to anyone visiting the site. This can cause user frustration and harm your site’s credibility.

If you’re embarking on an extensive website redesign you need to build a staging website on a temporary, separate domain. You can then switch domains when the new site is ready to go live.

This minimises disruption to your business. It also prevents search algorithms from indexing an incomplete page — and serving it in search results.

Website redesign SEO checklist: a step-by-step guide

The first five organic results in search engine result pages (SERPs) account for 69.1% of all clicks. And less than 1% of searchers click on the second page of Google results.

So if your website is doing well in terms of SEO, preserving that performance is a big deal for your business.

To redesign your website without causing an SEO disaster, follow these steps. Our website redesign SEO checklist contains all the tasks you need to complete to relaunch a website and protect your rankings. These include:

• Step 1: Establish your stakeholders and define project roles
• Step 2: Audit your current site
• Step 3: Determine your SEO and website redesign goals
• Step 4: Review the user journey and site architecture
• Step 5: Optimise your original content
• Step 6: Set up 301 redirects and your 404 error page
• Step 7: Optimise your site’s user experience
• Step 8: Update your XML sitemap
• Step 9: Test your site and monitor performance

Step 1: Establish your stakeholders and define project roles

A web redesign project is more likely to be successful when you get clear on who is responsible for what — and when all stakeholders get to provide their input.

So find out what people within your organisation expect from a redesign. Establish the risks to SEO when redesigning a website — and how you plan to minimise them. Then, assign website redesign roles.

If you’re working with a web design and development agency, like Radical, we’ll take care of this for you. Our team has all the expertise you need for a successful SEO website redesign, including expertise in:

• Client management
• Strategy
• Web design
• Web development
• SEO
• Content writing

Step 2: Audit your current site

An audit tells you how your current site is performing. It’ll highlight things that are working — and things that aren’t — so you can identify areas that need improvement.

When auditing your site, look at key metrics like backlinks, domain authority and the time users spend on your site. Also, find out how your website is performing in terms of organic traffic and conversions.

Qualitative data is useful, too. So assess your brand messaging. Ask yourself how up-to-date content is and whether your visuals are contemporary and eye-catching.

During this process, you’ll identify web pages that you want to keep and web pages that aren’t adding value to your site. Look out for:

• Web pages that have lots of views and inbound links. These pages need to be safeguarded. If you delete a high-performing page, you risk decreasing keyword ranking and website traffic.
• Web pages that are very similar to one another. Pages that target the same keywords or address the same user intent could be harming your rankings. It may be worth editing or deleting them.
• Web pages that are now irrelevant to your brand. Any pages that aren’t attracting organic traffic and don’t provide valuable information for your users should be updated or deleted.

Step 3: Determine your SEO and website redesign goals

Audit complete, you should have a clear idea of the strengths and weaknesses of your website. This makes it easier to decide your website redesign goals.

Of course, you don’t want to go backwards. At a minimum, you’ll want to preserve existing rankings and traffic. You may also want to improve user experience (UX). Or improve your conversion rate. Or create a more consistent brand identity.

Whatever you want your new site to achieve, set SMART goals. These are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Your web design and development agency can help you come up with goals that fit the SMART framework. Your web team can then work these objectives into your web redesign strategy.

At this point, it’s also worth setting a realistic timeline. It can take anywhere from one to six months to redesign a website. So work with your agency to set project milestones.

Step 4: Review the user journey and site architecture

Search engines prefer sites that are easy to use and engaging for website visitors. So when redesigning your website, take some time to review the user journey and site architecture.

Take a good look at the journey users take through your site. Identify any gaps or obstacles in that journey. You can then address these issues with your new design. And remember that — to ensure a seamless user journey — you need easy and logical navigation.

This is where site architecture comes in. For SEO success, you need to structure your site in a way that meets user needs and preferences. That way, it’s easy for users to find what they’re looking for.

So consider which links should feature in your navigation and in your footer — and decide whether you need to update any URLs. The priority here? Making it quick and easy for visitors to understand the relationship between different pages.

Step 5: Optimise your original content

If your original website content follows SEO best practice and contains up-to-date information, then save and reuse it on your newly refreshed site. But if you feel like your content could be working harder for you, optimise it.

Each page should target a collection of related keywords, known as a keyword cluster. And no two pages should target the same keywords — or answer the same user query.

So map keywords across your website to ensure there aren’t any gaps or duplicates. Then use these keywords to optimise each web page. Best practice means including keywords or keyword synonyms in:

• The page title
• The introductory paragraph
• Headings
• The URL
• Body text
• Meta description
• Image alt tags

Just remember that SEO is all about creating the best possible user experience. So don’t wedge keywords into your content where they don’t fit naturally. Also, add internal links. This helps search engine bots and readers navigate your site and understand the relationship between different website content.

Step 6: Set up 301 redirects and 404 pages

Some web pages will be worth keeping and updating. Others may need to be deleted. But you can’t just delete pages and go ahead with your redesign. First, you need to check whether these pages have any backlinks.

Backlinks are a powerful ranking factor. And when you delete a page, that page and your site lose those backlinks — unless you set up 301 redirects.

When you use a 301 redirect, any web visitors or search engine bots that try to access a deleted page will be sent to relevant content that still exists on your website. These redirects also pass all ranking power from the old URL to the new one, which makes it easier to retain rankings and traffic.

You should also use redirects if you change the URLs or structure of your website. They’ll ensure users don’t end up at a website dead end.

And speaking of dead ends, a website redesign is a great opportunity to update your 404 error page. Users will end up on your 404 page if they click on a broken link that’s slipped through the net. So personalise your 404 page, update it with your new branding and give users the guidance they need to get back to a working web page.

Step 7: Optimise your site for UX

Google uses over 200 different ranking factors when deciding where your site shows up in search engine results. But according to Search Engine Journal, page experience is one of the top three. This makes it a top consideration for site redesign SEO.

To create a site that provides the best possible user experience, you need to optimise it for:

• Page speed
• Responsiveness
• Accessibility

That way, no matter your user or their device, they get an easy and streamlined experience on your website. A good web team will go beyond these basics, incorporating a few of the latest web design trends to create an engaging and memorable user experience.

Step 8: Update your XML sitemap

The penultimate task on your website redesign SEO checklist? Updating your XML sitemap.

If you’ve changed the structure of your site or any URL slugs, then you need to update your site map. Once updated, submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

This map helps search engines navigate your site. It helps them get to grips with any changes you’ve made to your site, which means it’ll show up in search results more quickly.

Step 9: Test your site and monitor performance

Redesign complete, it’s time to test your site. It may help to run another website audit. This will highlight any issues — like broken links, long title tags or missing alt text. You can then fix these issues before your site goes live.

And once your website is live, keep a close eye on things. Monitor performance so you can make changes quickly if rankings and traffic are going in the wrong direction.

Get in the experts. Let Radical handle SEO and website redesign for your business.

When you redesign your website, there’s a lot at stake. You don’t want your site to fall down search engine rankings.

But you can’t sit back and delay a redesign either. Doing nothing can harm your SEO in the long run. If competitor websites start offering a better user experience, with up-to-the-minute functionality or visuals, your rankings will start to fall anyway.

So the best approach is a careful and considered SEO website redesign. For that, you need the experts. Here at Radical, we have all the expertise you need for a smooth and SEO-friendly transition to a new and improved website.

We can take care of SEO, branding, web design, web development and content writing. We can also keep your new site up on those top spots with an ongoing package of SEO support.

So put your site in safe hands. Get in touch with the Radical team to chat about your website redesign today.