In an increasingly digital world, businesses invest a significant portion of their marketing budgets in digital channels, including their websites. However, even the best website design will eventually require some updates.  

Businesses modify their websites for many reasons, including modernization, brand renewal, and improving the user experience. In addition, website redesign can have a significant impact on SEO and search rankings — as long as a business keeps its SEO results and essential SEO-friendly redesign practices at the forefront of its redesign efforts. 

Preparing for a Website Redesign 

Deciding to redesign a website is no small thing. Many steps are involved in revamping your brand and reoptimizing your site. It requires a time-, labor-, and cost-intensive process, but the results can ultimately lead to a huge net benefit for the company in terms of search results and sales. Having said that, it’s important to prepare before investing a lot of time and money in new strategies. That means establishing a clear vision and setting goals for the new website as well as developing a plan for achieving them. 

Website Audit 

Before you change anything about your website or its design, start by taking a long look at what you already have in place. A detailed website audit should include an inventory of your content assets as well as all the data on the URLs included on your site. You can use several tools to perform this audit, including reviewing your Google Analytics and Google Search Console reports as well as implementing outside programs like Screaming Frog and SEMrush, that can help you determine which pages (and the content on them) are the best performers and should be kept in place and possibly enhanced. 

Keyword Research 

As your website changes, it’s important to consider other aspects of its marketing strategy, including keywords. Are there new keywords you want to focus on with the new site? You may determine that it’s important to focus on certain new keywords, but some may remain the same. Start by conducting keyword research similar to when launching a brand new website. Look for relevant keywords for your industry and consider how your target audience searches. 

Backlinks 

Backlinks are another important consideration when planning for a website redesign. To clarify, backlinks are links to your website from outside, third-party sites. These are links you earn by providing solid content that other businesses consider worthwhile. Backlinks establish you as a trusted voice in your industry, and it’s critical to protect and maintain that standing. Therefore, make sure you track your backlinks prior to your redesign, taking care to maintain those that are valuable to you and your business. 

SEO-Friendly Redesign 

For many businesses, undergoing a website redesign makes a lot of sense. There is no better way to help elevate and relaunch your brand, and a website redesign can have a significant positive effect on your SEO and search rankings when it is planned well. However, business owners make a lot of common mistakes when undergoing a website redesign that can similarly tank their rankings. Approaching a redesign with the right mindset is crucial.  

Maintain URL Structure 

One of the most important elements of a redesigned website architecture is the URL structure. This is another term for the specific addresses of the pages on your site. The URL structure needs to balance SEO needs with easy usability. Avoid creating unnecessarily long URLs, stick with lowercase letters, and eliminate stop words whenever possible. 

Mobile Responsiveness 

When you redesign your website, it is essential to keep mobile optimization at the heart of your strategy. Mobile responsiveness has a direct effect on your website traffic, especially among younger generations. In fact, some statistics suggest that as much as 45% of all web traffic in 2024 will come from mobile devices. 

Speed Optimization 

Your site’s load speed has a direct effect on your SEO rankings because slow page load times can frustrate potential visitors, causing them to leave. Therefore, optimizing your load speed as a part of your redesign effort is essential. There are several ways to decrease your site’s load time, including image optimization, browser caching, and content delivery networks (CDNs). 

Content Strategy 

When it comes to the nitty-gritty logistics of a website redesign, content is probably the most time-consuming and costly other than the programming itself. However, when you have the right approach to content from the start, you set your site up for long-term success. A proper content strategy, which includes using content to drive design and professional copywriting, is a key part of maintaining and building your SEO rankings. 

On-Page SEO 

When it comes to increasing organic traffic and building success with a redesigned website, you cannot skip on-page SEO. Including an optimized and well-written title and meta description, structured internal links, and properly formatted headers goes a long way in explaining the content and structure of your page to users and search engines alike. Following basic SEO best practices helps to increase your visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) and can drive more traffic to your site. 

Testing and Quality Assurance 

Once you have prepared your plan and followed through with strategies to boost and maintain your SEO rankings, it is time to test out your redesigned website and make sure that you are offering the type of experience that users want. This includes implementing several quality assurance steps, running audits, and testing processes before and after launching your new site. 

Broken Links 

Website quality assurance is so much more than just looking at a final product or even asking for focus-group-style opinions from users. True quality assurance looks at every element of your site, tests, and reports back. This includes running a site crawl to check for errors like broken internal and external links. 

Post-Launch SEO Monitoring 

Remember, you need to continue to monitor, test, and update your website, even after you launch it. This includes looking at the SEO performance and overall experience of your new site and directly comparing it to your old results as well as your goals. Minimally, this should include: 

• Traffic Analysis: Be sure to collect and analyze the data from your site’s new visitors and their actions (i.e., who comes to your site and what they do when they get there). This can help give insight into the content users are gravitating toward and what happens after they consume that content. 
• Rank Tracking: This is the process of monitoring where your URLs rank in SERPs for specific keywords over time. When you rank track, you monitor the general results of your redesign in terms of SERP. You can use this information to decide on which keywords you want to continue to focus on in the future.  

Work with the Experienced Team at Elevation Ten Thousand 

A website redesign is a major undertaking for any business, and it should not be taken lightly. If you want to both maintain your current SEO rankings and increase your SEO from a redesign, it is important to make sure you are using the right tools and are up to date on the latest trends in organic search, SEO optimization, and overall design and content creation.  

For many businesses, that means seeking help from professionals who know these details inside and out, such as the team at Elevation Ten Thousand. Our team of experienced marketing professionals can take you through the planning, strategizing, content, design, and testing phases of a website redesign with an ever-watchful eye on the particulars of your business and your industry. Ready to learn more? Contact us today!