After reading our last article, you have decided to optimize the structure of your website? We are not going to dissuade you from it, because it is often a good way to gain organic traffic and to offer a better user experience. But a website redesign, whatever the reasons, is never without risk for your SEO. And for good reason, when we undertake such an approach, we know what we are leaving, but we do not always know what we are going to replace it with.
The better the original site performs in terms of natural referencing, the more there is to lose when switching to the new site. Also, to leave nothing to chance, it is better to start with a good battle plan. Positions in the SERP, backlinks, internal linking, redirections, sitemap, semantic optimizations, page depth, metadata, loading time, responsive design… The list of elements to take into account is endless.
So, whether before, during or after the process of redesigning your site, here are our 16 SEO tips to help you make this operation a lasting success.
Before the Redesign of the Site: What Elements to Analyze in an SEO Audit?
Identify Your Best Performing Content And Those With Potential
Before plunging your hands into the grease for your site redesign, it is essential to take stock of your current SEO performance. The goal is to know where you are starting from, to determine what needs to be preserved and what can be improved, starting with your content.
Do some of your pages get good positions on Google and bring you natural traffic? You have to be careful not to lose this when putting your new site online. On the contrary, some of your pages bring nothing to your natural referencing? You have to ask yourself if they can be optimized or if there is actually no point in keeping them.
Take Stock of your Keyword Opportunities
Even if it means rethinking your website, use PPC for Healthcare Businesses tools beforehand (Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMrush, etc.) to assess the relevance of your keyword strategy. Your internal data and search volume estimation data will surely bring up queries that you have not worked on and which nevertheless represent an interest for your business. Now is the time to make room for them in your new content creation organization.
Examine the Depth of your Pages in the Tree
Among the enemies of SEO experts, orphan pages are at the top of the list. Not being linked to other pages of the site through the internal mesh, they do not exist in the eyes of Google or, at least, it is just like. But the pages located more than three or four clicks from the site’s homepage hardly exist anymore…
However, it often happens that important content for natural referencing is found on orphan pages or too deep in the tree structure. In other words, they have no chance of generating traffic. Before redesigning your site, your SEO audit must therefore allow you to identify these forgotten corners of your tree structure to make room for them in your new structure.
Study Your UX Data
Today, it is unthinkable to approach natural referencing independently of the user experience. We are also talking more and more about SXO (association of “SEO” and “UX”) and, from this point of view, the first thing to do is to observe the behavior of visitors to your site.
By analyzing browsing sessions, you can identify the pages of your site that meet the expectations of your target and those that, on the contrary, push them to turn away from you. The idea? Detect any technical or thematic brakes on your site to correct them in its new version.
Analyze your Backlink Profile
Redesigning a site does not mean that you have to ignore “off-site” SEO, that is to say the network of referring sites that constitute the net linking of the site concerned. Before the redesign, it is therefore advisable to produce an analysis of your backlinks profile, in order to correctly integrate those that bring value to your SEO and leave out those that could have a negative impact.
The team of our SEO agency has also developed a tailor-made process for this, which we make available to you free of charge on request via our contact form:
This is an often-overlooked aspect, which nevertheless allows you to quickly put order in a net linking strategy.
Go on the Hunt for Technical Problems
404 errors, too long loading times on certain pages, bugs in the CSS code, JavaScript blocks, non-responsive design… There is no shortage of potential causes of technical errors on a website and they degrade its SEO. Redesigning your site is therefore a good opportunity to track down these malfunctions and add their resolution to your long checklist of things to do.
During The Redesign Of The Site: What Optimizations To Bring To Boost Its Natural Referencing?
Work on a Dedicated Server
Most companies think about it, but we still prefer to remember it: it is essential to create the new site on a test server before switching it to your main server. You never know, when you start, how long the site redesign process will take, or if unexpected problems will arise. To avoid the risk of staying with a business site offline for several days, or even several weeks, it is therefore better to work in the shadows until the day of the public launch.
Improve The Structure Of Your Texts
The structure of your texts is one of the areas of optimization that can have the greatest impact on your SEO referencing. So, why not take advantage of the redesign of your site to give your article headings and Hen titles a bit of a makeover? This will send a positive signal to Google when indexing the new version of your site and, in addition to gaining you positions in the search results, it could help you to reach positions 0 of the SERP.
Diversify The Semantic Field Of Your Content That Has Potential
Your SEO audit prior to the redesign of the site highlighted content whose full potential was not exploited or interesting keywords left out? The redesign phase then gives you a good opportunity to remedy this and broaden your semantic spectrum. Here, the objective is twofold:
- Densify your high-potential content by integrating more semantic variants.
- Add content now to process user requests that are not processed in the current version of the site.
Check your HTML Tags
In SEO, HTML tags are a small detail that can pay off big. So, before putting your new site online, take the time to check the <title> tags and the <imp> tags of your important pages in particular. A few simple optimizations on these two elements can quickly raise your content in the search results, while waiting to deepen the question.
Lighten Your Pages
Since the Google Page Experience update of May 2021 and its “Core Web Vitals” section, UX has been at the heart of debates related to the algorithm of the famous search engine. Basically, the factors used to assess the quality of a site’s visitor experience now officially weigh in on that site’s ranking in search results. And, among these factors, the page loading time occupies an important place.
So, if you undertake to review the design of your site, take the opportunity to reduce the weight of your pages as much as possible in order to improve their loading time, especially on mobile. This will have a positive impact on the navigation of your users and Google Bots will value this change when crawling your site.
Keep your Backlinks up to Date
The preliminary analysis of your backlinks profile has normally highlighted among your referring sites those which really improve your natural referencing. These must therefore be treated with great vigilance when redesigning your site. As much as possible, try to keep URLs from your old site that have good backlinks. And, when this is not possible, contact the relevant referring sites with the aim of having them update their link with the new URL.
Install the Necessary Redirects
Even with the best will in the world, sometimes a new site involves removing certain URLs from the old site. This is never trivial in SEO, but don’t panic, just set up 301 redirects in your hatches file to prevent your visitors from landing on 404 error pages.
The real difficulty is to deal with these redirections in a systematic way so as not to forget any of them. Fortunately, tools exist for this and our SEO consultants can support you in this task.
After the Redesign of the Site: What Actions To Integrate Into The Seo Strategy?
Submit new sitemap to Search Console
Your new site is now online? Congratulations, you have gone to the end of your idea and it is already a great success. It now remains to inform Google that you have reviewed everything in depth, in particular your page tree. And, for that, you need to send him a new “sitemap” file by uploading it to your Search Console. By doing so, you can both speed up and improve the indexing of your new site.
Regularly Monitor Your Seo Positions And Your Natural Traffic
From the first days of existence of your new site, you must get into the habit of regularly monitoring the impact of its online presence on your natural referencing with Google. This includes using Google Search Console and Google Analytics to check that all of your pages are indexing correctly and that organic traffic from your positions in the SERPs is not decreasing. After a few weeks, if you’ve done it right, it should even increase…
Boost Your Net Linking
Redesigning a site is always a major event in an SEO for Carpenters. Also, it may be welcome to coincide the launch of the new site with obtaining some new quality backlinks. This will send a positive signal to Google and give a little more power to this new site that you have just launched in the jungle of natural referencing.
