Last updated on December 1st, 2020 at 03:37 pm
Having an old business website is just like having an old item which is of no use, revamping the website is very important as the business and online trends changes daily, to keep up the pace with the current trend we need to revamp the website every year and so. The main reason behind it to give your customer or visitor an experience that unleashes several opportunities not only for them but also for the business owners.
Generally revamping of a website is ignored by most of the business owners which affects their marketing activities resulting in losing new customers, this is the same as you are the owner of a Decade old showroom which affects your power to attract buyers.
Just like other things redesigning a website is also a part of a natural business cycle, redesigning keeps your business relevant which dramatically impact your user experience and many things like brand value and most important the SEO, the main drawback of redesigning the website is it throws away the SEO authority which results in dumping your existing search traffic.
Before revamping your website go for the proper themes and image selection for more about how to do image selection you can check out our blog post on How to Pick Background Images for Your Online Store.
Hosting and domain selection is also very important if you are not satisfied with your hosting service provider or with your domain name, always go for the hosting service which is reliable, fast and affordable.
So let’s discuss how you can maintain the SEO while revamping the website:
Interaction of developers and SEO professionals is very important. Considering SEO throughout the redesigning process can save you from losing your position in the search engine.
The below technical SEO checklist can help you to keep track of changes made while revamping the website:
Crawling & Auditing:
You can use many tools like screaming frog and Google search console to index your new pages with several important metadata that you want the same as before. Try to check the below issues while indexing:
- Duplicate page titles, image alt, H1 tags and meta descriptions.
- Page titles between 150 to 512 pixels.
- Try to limit meta description to 923 pixels only.
- Checking 404 pages. If present, implementing 301 redirects.
- Use of canonical issues.
- And most important any metadata duplicacy.
- You should also check for the numbers of URL crawled, you can easily check by doing site:yoursiteurl.com in a search engine.
- XML sitemap & robots.txt is also as important as any other aspects.
By the way, you can set up the test website so that you cross-check if anything is missing during the revamping process. Basically, you can use an old website as a template for your new website.
Having a copy of the original URL crawl and also any changes which are made on a new site especially the new URLs.
Content Planning & Creation:
- Trying to revamp the content as well, while revamping the website as the new content can align you up with the latest trends.
- Checking up the landing pages content for the relevancy and the SEO.
- Making sure that the new site is set to noindex from within the robots file, not doing this can show your test site in Google.
- Eliminating any links to pages that you are removing and also taking care of changes which exists in old websites.
- Crawling and auditing the test site before switching the test site to a real-time environment by crawling it again.
- Matching up the content to ensure that the old and the test site is lined up correctly.
Internal Link Structure:
Now the time to cross-check all the links which are directly pointing towards the specific page or not.
- You can bulk export the URLs from the crawlers.
- If find any page with 404 error then try redirecting by integrating the .htaccess file to the server.
- You will also need to update the links to 301 pages so that they are pointed appropriately to the specific page.
Launch Time:
- After addressing all the issues the site should be ready to launch but doing a final crawl can always be a good idea.
- Removing index from the unwanted URLs or any backend pages.
- Ensuring whether the redirection is working correctly or not.
After launching please check the following page audit:
- Reviewing of header usage to ensure a proper outline structure for search engines & your visitors
- Checking the display capabilities of the pages, ensure responsiveness of the website.
- W3 Validation to check HTML and XHTML.
- Checking text ratio.
- Checking schema and structure data is in place or not.
- Check images whether it is optimized in terms of size and alt text.
- Optimize images for load times
- Updating internal links tas per the new URL structure
- Create 301 redirects for any URL changes to existing content
- Create a new XML sitemap
- Check the Robots.txt file and validate
Final Words: Keeping in mind that ignoring the above checklist can easily deviate you from the relevant process which results in losing more business.
