If you use your website as a marketing tool then it’s only a matter of time before a refresh or redesign is in the cards. The process can be time consuming and expensive. Keeping that in mind you need to know how to do SEO when doing a website redesign. This will cut down on your expenses and when the website is launched, you will reap the benefits right away as opposed to losing rankings and traffic. We will be discussing what to do and not to do during a website redesign and how setting up for SEO can be a game changer.
Set Your Website Up For Conversions
Any reputable SEO company should be able to get rankings and traffic to your website. Although this is great, it won’t make a difference if you can’t convert on that traffic. Too many websites make the mistake of trying to push too many products or services. You will always have more success by narrowing down your messaging to your few core services or products and leaving breadcrumbs to the remaining ones. By implementing something like Story Brand, you will have the messaging you are trying to portray on your website before the building process even begins. How does Story Brand help you in your website’s messaging?
- Put yourself in your customers shoes. As a business owner if you can’t do this task then you probably have bigger problems then online visibility.
- You are not the hero, your customer is. Although it can be tempting to bang your chest and show the world how awesome you are, it will better serve you to put your customer on a pedestal and be a guide rather than a hero.
- How does your product or service solve your customers problems? You need to communicate that clearly to your customers almost immediately after landing on your website.
Make Sure Your Website Is Responsive
What makes your website responsive or not? If your website is responsive it will adapt to a variety of devices and screen sizes. This has become increasingly important as mobile devices make up over half of total web searches, which means it’s more than any other method. To ensure a good responsive design, a lot of designers use Bootstrap and Wirefy. These tools are free and help your design with responsiveness once developed on your website platform. 
URL Structure and Mapping
The URL structure/mapping part of a redesign is often overlooked but should not be ignored. Your URLs should serve as a roadmap for the search engines to make sense of your website and how it is organized. If you don’t want to leave SEO to chance, it is important to make sure your keyword can be found in the URL of the page that is assigned that specific keyword. You can also severely affect your traffic and rankings by changing your URLs and not redirecting the proper pages before the new site goes live. Google has indexed your rankings in relation to pages on your website. Ignoring this step could make some of your pages start from scratch with the search engines.
Google Page Experience Update May 2021
Everything we have talked about for the exception of URL mapping is included in the update coming in the next few months. User experience is more important than ever so to ignore with is in this algorithm update can hurt your online visibility. Here is what is included in the new update.
- Mobile Friendliness – Just like it sounds, your website needs to be friendly to mobile users.
- Safe-Browsing (secure website) – Security is everything these days, websites need to be secure which can be purchased through your hosting provider.
- Page Load Speed – Websites that are fast are more enjoyable to be on which directly reflects on user experience.
We hope that we have explained how important it is to do SEO when doing a website redesign. Don’t leave your SEO to chance and make sure your website is optimized accordingly.
