Website design trends are forever changing, just like every other aspect of online marketing! Because of this, it is important to ensure that your website mirrors industry standards. This means doing regular website redesigns and updates. While a website refresh may sound all well and good, you are probably wondering how it will affect your already existing on-page/off-page SEO and Google rankings. This is what you need to know:
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The Goal
What is important to remember is that when conducting a website redesign, the main goal is to preserve your existing rankings and online traffic. However, it is also to improve your existing rankings and online traffic!
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User Experience
You can relax a bit about the changes to your SEO seeing that Google now places a lot of emphasis on the quality of the user experience that a website can provide. Therefore, if the new website design allows for easier navigation, faster page loading times, and also offer the browser access to plenty of optimised, original and interesting content, your rankings are sure to improve over time.
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What Can Change and How to Fix it?
Obviously, when designing a new website, it is impossible not to see a change in your search engine optimisation. Things that can change include:
- URLs
- Meta data
- Page-level optimisation
- The removal of old content and the addition of new content
- Domain name, as well as subdomain
Here is how to preserve your SEO despite the new website design:
- Keep the old website live on a temporary web address, and ensure that it cannot be accessed by crawlers,
- Utilise 301 redirects,
- Save crawl data,
- Minimise changes to content that has received a positive response, and
- Save all on-page optimisation by crawling your old site.
Need help with a new website design? The WSI OMS team of digital marketing experts can help! Contact us today for more information about our services.