Rethink & Redesign – A Step Up Guide to Update your Website

When I was asked to write the step-wise aspects that are to be considered while redesigning a site, I remember my own days of struggle as an SEO expert when my client did not consult me before redesigning. I encountered a tough time to redo the SEO for the newly designed site.

A Word of Thought

Before redesigning it is important to first think about how far the new results will help in the growth of the business and how much it would affect the existing SEO. A proper consultation with an SEO expert who can understand the website pattern or had been associated with the website previously would be preferred in the wake of proposed changes. If there is drastic scope of improvement then it is worth giving a shot basis the below steps.

Step 1: while considering revamping the website for any business reason, enhancements, design change is to consider having a word with SEO. Clients should strongly consult SEO before redesigning and should not ignore the content from historical pages.

Step 2: Involves to crawl the site to get hold of the structure and a tool like “Screaming Frog” can help budge into this data for checking missing page titles, duplicate pages, H1 tags(missing, duplicate, multiple), canonical tags, etc. Understanding current site’s metadata & structure are essential posts that can be mapped to the new site too.

Step 3: Auditing the site either manually or by using tools like “Woorank” is recommended to understand the nitty-gritties of the site like site speed, URL structure, duplicate content. This would help us understand the points website is good on and the scope of improvements needed.

Step 4: Avoiding no-index by Google. Care should be taken that Google alt does not index the new site. If it happens all the new content has no value as it would be duplicated.

Step 5: This step is basically to understand how the test site is structured. A crawler tool available online can be of good help. Crawlers are programmed to visit websites, read through the pages in order to create an entry in search engine.

Step 6: Involves analyzing data for the sake of a final crawled test wherein we find and replace URLs. Post which we have to crawl the swapped URLs.  Also, the test site is checked for metadata on live URLs. We further go ahead to check for 404 i.e. page not found errors on test site. The next step is confirming 301  i.e. for checking of movement of data permanently post the updation.

Step 7: This step includes additional checks such as “Rank Checks” used for measuring site performance for common keywords in search engines. This gives us a reality check when we compare it with historical results and thus gives a clear understanding of glitches if any. The second check is on the proper copying of content. Thirdly, placing back the analytics code back in the header section. A final check involves the most important aspect i.e. unblocking the site and checking for the updated site experience in terms of look and feel of the cosmetic changes.

A full and final summary check of all the steps would fetch extra innings in the SEO results, thus bringing the task to an end. There are a number of useful tips, sites, and informative content running to pages on the above steps, which would give any beginner a detailed outlook on the free online tools, optimizing methods, and other crawl, spider tests that can be run to attain best SEO results. So folks use the above information for healthy organic traffic in your websites.