How to Plan a Website Redesign With Losing SEO Traffic

A website redesign is the perfect opportunity for your business to grow traffic, but not to watch your rankings disappear overnight. The reality is that many redesigns fail because of the fact that SEO is not correctly prioritised correctly, or treated as a core part of the planning process.

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When you want to improve your website redesign, and the results that come with it, you need to understand what is involved, and how best to plan for the future. If you want to be able to enjoy a brand new website that looks amazing, as well as performing better in search results, here's how you plan your redesign without compromising on your SEO rankings.

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Set a Benchmark for SEO

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Before you spend any time creating a single wireframe, it is essential to make sure you document the site's current SEO performance. You need to know what you're working with, and how your new website should be performing. This includes recording things like keyword rankings, top-performing pages, backlinks, conversions, baselines, and organic traffic levels. Having an idea of what these are before you start your redesign is one of the best ways of being able to achieve success when it comes to making the right long-term decisions for the future.

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Audit Your Content

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Auditing your content will help you ensure that every page earns its place on your new site. That means you have to conduct a content audit, and categorise your pages to figure out what is working, what needs improvement, and what has to be changed. High-performing pages need to be preserved and enhanced as much as possible, and this is something that can help to improve your new site, and ensure success when you look to redesign your site.

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Determine Your URL Structures in Advance

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URL structures are important, and these need to be locked in early in the process. Changing URLs is one of the biggest SEO risks when it comes to redesign, and this is why it is important to keep as many existing URLs intact as possible. Map every URL to its closest new equivalent if you have to make changes, and try to avoid mass redirects to the homepage, as this is something that can cause confusion with search engines.

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Preserve SEO Fundamentals

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SEO fundamentals are crucial when trying to run a high-ranking and optimally performing site. During the content migration process, it's easy to lose critical on-page elements, and this means you need to ensure that important pages will retain their optimised title tags and metadata descriptions, H1s and subheadings, and structured internal links. Rewriting your content for tone and branding is also a good idea, provided you protect keywords and search intent.

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If you can do this right, and make sure your redesign is planned out effectively, not only will you avoid losing SEO traffic, but you will also have a strong and better-performing website as a result. This is essential for the future, and will help you run a more successful website, and business, long-term.