Not getting enough traffic on your website? Thinking to redesign your website without affecting SEO of your website? Well, you are at the right place. Here, you will know the answers of all of your questions. You just need to follow the instructions given in this article step by step. Let’s get started.
If you are working a business then it is essential for you to create an attractive website. It is also important to see website and update it time to time according to Google updates so that you can prevent your website from SEO mistakes. Scroll down to know the most common mistakes made by you and the tricks to navigate an SEO-forward redesign.
Redesigning a website is very important where you need to do hundreds of creative, technical, financial, strategic and operational decisions to go through. To redesign your website, you firstly need to plan out your goals but it needs several months in designing, writing and developing the website for your customers.
The key of redesigning a successful website is to make sure that your website is created and speaks in the language of search engines as well as SEO. Now, the question is how to ensure that SEO value that you built with your old website is retained same and how to enhance your website value on your redesigned website? In this article, you will know the most common SEO mistakes to avoid when redesigning your old website.
If you do not have digital presence of your website then there is not any advantage of designing a fresh and beautiful website for your business. When you are thinking to redesign the website of your company then you do not need to focus only on icons and banners to get the top position in search engine results. There are also some parameters on which you need to focus to catch higher position in search engine attention and boost traffic. It is not enough to create content for your website according to Google guidelines but it is also essential that new visitors will be able to find your website easily.
Redesign Website on a Temporary URL
Always avoid to redesign your existing website unless it is not essential as it can cause visitors and traffic issues on your website in the long run. The best trick is to copy your whole website and set it into a temporary URL. Once you done with all this, you can make changes in it. Another way is to switch to some other domain once you made all the required redesign changes in your website. You can also host the company to do redesigning of your website without affecting SEO. It is essential to ping your hosting provider to do setup of your website to protect you from unforeseen issues in future.
Test New Redesign Website
You firstly need to copy your existing website into the new website. If you are thinking to redesign your website then it is good to you to do an end-to-end check up of your website. In this check-up, you need to look up several aspects of your website such as features, broken links, CSS and many more. You can use XENU to use tool to find all the broken links on your website.
List all Web Pages from Old Websites
Another most important step in redesigning the website is to download the URL structure of your website. Redesigning of a website means a lot of changes that affect the URL re-structure. It is important to make a backup of your website. If you do not create a backup then there is a risk of downgrade the website ranking. You can also use the plugins to get the proper and correct URL structure. In case, you are using Yoast SEO plugin then you can crawl the website and download the updated sitemap.
Improper Use of Redirects
Redirects are very important when you are redesigning your website in case you have to change URLs. Basically, it is a command that tells the search engines to find the content which is no longer at a particular URL. The most common SEO mistake is using 301 redirects or 302 redirects in the wrong way. What happen if you eliminate pages from your old website? In this case, you have to redirect your old page to the most relevant new pages having similar keywords. It is the best option instead of sending the visitors to homepage or blog.
Does Not Submitting a Sitemap
It is essential that every website submit a sitemap to different search engines such as Bing, Google, and Yahoo. The sitemap can be submitted through the respective search engine tools feature. The work of sitemap shows the URL for the whole website which helps the search engine in understanding the organization of your website.
Not Consulting UX Team
Another step in redesigning the website without affecting SEO is to concentrate on proven UX processes. It means to keep your target audience aware about making changes. When you are developing a new website or working towards UX and SEO for website redesigning then your goal is to keep your customers engaged with your website. It is good to create an intuitive site structure as it provides helpful information and enable the website visitor to find the exact things for which they are looking on your website. If you want to make your website an effective marketing tool then you need to create intuitive path so that users sign up for an email newsletter to perform some desired action. You need to create your website interesting and engaging so because bad or confusing experience on a website can frustrate users and they leave the website.
Concentrating on Only Design Instead of Usability
If you are redesigning your website, then make sure it is innovative full of sleek, uniqueness and modern features. You should create a website in such way that it is not only focusing on design but also beneficial for users. when users visit to a website then they have some expectations about how their website will look like and how it functions. It is good to hide your main navigation menu under three lines in top right corner of your website. It should be simple as well as streamlined. Your website should be of such type that inform the customers about your brand, products and services. Always design your website that is creative and prioritize functionality to your target audience. In the website redesigning process, also make sure that your users will navigate easily on your website.
Skipping Responsive Design
Nowadays, most of the online searches are performed on mobile devices. It is also important that your website design should be responsive so that visitors view the website from any device from which they want to access the internet. The mobile users will face issues in viewing the website when website is not optimized for mobile devices such as navigating the website, viewing the content etc.
Unclear Calls-To-Action
Call-to-action buttons are placed on the website to guide the users to navigate on the website and convert them into customers. Strategic calls to actions are important for a good web design. If you do not use call-to-action on your website then your customers will be confused or unaware how to take the next step. Remember to do not add multiple link options on your website so that user does not confuse which CTA is needed to follow. A good CTA button navigate the users to a landing page of website.
