Introduction
A website redesign is crucial for any business willing to do better with its current traffic and conversions. During the complete web redesign process, there are many factors that have to be given due importance and if you want to understand those, I request you to read this blog. This blog hosts all those factors in a form of a handy SEO checklist for a website redesign.
This blog has been written keeping SEO factor as the major role player when redesigning a website. By focusing on the factors listed below, you will be able to retain your existing SEO page ranks while improving traffic and conversions on your website.
Complete SEO Checklist for Website Redesign
For your convenience, I have divided each of these website redesign SEO plan/steps into major sections of pre-launch, launch, and post-launch. It is a kind of handy SEO checklist for a website redesign that you just open & compare easily.
Website Redesign SEO checklist before the launch
Here are the few website redesign SEO considerations, you need to ensure before the website is launched.
1. Try to host a temporary URL while creating a new robots.txt file
2. Make sure to note your Current Search Engine rankings & metrics and set them as your benchmarks
3. Audit your existing website performance including page speed, running various SEO diagnoses, mobile compliance, site compliance, etc.
4. Collect all the information on your backlinks and write a status against them in terms of Active/Inactive.
5. Try to map your keywords with your current backlinks and important pages
6. Make Search Engine Friendly URLs for your upcoming new website
7. Prepare a redirect list as per the 301 URL mapping
8. Prepare all the internal as well as external backlinks list and map their current status
9. Check your high performing website pages and not the images, alt tags, and image tags being used - make a list of all these.
10. Make sure to check Cookie Law and implement changes if needed
11. Check your legal and policy pages
12. Make a list of all the 404 pages that exist
Website Redesign SEO checklist during the launch
Here is a website redesign SEO plan/steps that you need to ensure during the site launch.
1. First of all start by blocking the google bot
2. Now start inspecting your new web pages that are already live using tools like hotjar and lucky orange
3. Try to provide your website a unique meta-tagging for better SEO results
4. Make sure to hit your Warning Message wherever needed
5. Set Up a Monitoring Plan and Team to check your upcoming website performance
6. Make a new google analytics goal sheet
7. At the launch time check your Robots.txt file
8. It’s now time to set up the 301 redirects
9. Review your Google Search Console Settings and set it up if needed
10. It is now time to reindex your website on Google Search Console
11. Review google analytics once again to see if everything is being tracked or not
12. Check your current site speed and cross-check with your existing benchmarks
13. Check your image optimization techniques along with mobile/tablet friendliness
Website Redesign SEO checklist after the launch
Pretty much everything has to be done again or cross-checked after the website is live. Other website redesign SEO plan/steps are as follows:
Create Annotation in Google Analytics
Check if your 301 redirects are working properly or not
Adjust your goals in google analytics and tweak them as per your requirements
After running a google page index test, check the number of new pages indexed.
After a day or two monitor google search console errors and rankings.
Compare your results with your benchmarks and take the necessary steps to
Constantly update your Social Media pages and check if the links are updated on your website or not
The Backlinks list that was made earlier, you need to thoroughly visit each one of them and update them as per the new URL structures
These were the few website redesign SEO considerations you need to ensure throughout the website redesign cycle. An important note: Most of the things in the third checklist - After the launch, have to be monitored for almost 1 month more. Once done, you are up for celebrating your success when you hit your benchmarks while the new ones are planned.
Source link:- A Complete SEO Checklist for Your Website Redesign
