7 Essential Steps To Revamp Your Website Without Affecting Your Ranking

One of the reasons a website redesign is needed is when you decide to change your target audience. The main goal of building a website is to attract more buyers and increase your sales. To do that, you will need to improve user experience and increase engagement. If your current site is not serving its purpose, then it’s best to make the necessary changes and relaunch it.

A website relaunch needs to be done ASAP if your company has outgrown your website. After all, change is the only constant thing in this world. To be able to keep up with the ever-changing times and the ever-increasing user demand, you need to change the overall look and feel of your site.

In other words, your site needs to adapt to the web design trends to stay on top of the competition.

That’s just the icing on the cake, though.

If your website isn’t doing well in terms of ranking, you’ll need to do a complete overhaul – you’ll need to go through a thorough process of rehashing your site.

It’s important that you carefully check what needs to be changed or updated to avoid affecting your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ranking. You don’t want to waste the time, effort, and money you invested in building up your link authority and ranking, right?

Essential tips to relaunching your site

The goal is to revamp your site in the smoothest way possible. Thus, you need to devise a foolproof strategy to do so.

Take a look at these seven tips to make your SEO unaffected by the relaunch process.

1. Audit your website.

If you don’t address SEO problems in your old website, chances are, they’re going to be carried over to the new site. This is why you need to conduct a comprehensive. This is also to get useful insights that can help you redesign your site.

You will need to get SEO services to hire an expert to audit your site in the initial stages of the relaunch. This gives you the assurance that your site is built correctly the first time, minimizing the need to make changes after you’ve launched it, which could cost you a lot of money. An audit should be done before and after your relaunch.

It will help to check for site errors, website performance, improve search engine optimization, and so on. This will allow you to take the next action – be it improve page speed for conversion or improve user experience through an easy-to-use navigation bar and testimonials.

2. Crawl new URLs; make sure to do 301 redirects correctly.

There’s no shortcut to moving your content to your new URLs. You need to determine which pages should be propagated first. This is where crawling your pages is of great help. The process can be tricky though, especially when you have a lot of pages or the site navigation is quite complex.

To ensure that crawling is done right, you need to have a reliable site crawl tool, like HTTrack, Getleft, Octoparse, OutWit Hub, and Visual Scraper, to name a few.

You also need to check pages that are externally linked to make sure that every single one is getting link authority while you’re moving your content. Watch out for pages with lots of external links pointing to them. You’ll need to make sure that the link authority is maintained and is redirected to the corresponding URLs of your new site.

You will also need to check all the URLs that drive organic traffic on your old site. Make sure that your new site will have an equivalent page for each one of those old URLs. You will then need to implement a 301-redirect plan to avoid losing valuable link equity and traffic.

3. Use a phased approach.

Instead of moving your entire website to its new URLs, it would be wiser to move a subcategory, subdomain, or subdirectory at a time. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to move the rest in smaller chunks, which lowers the risk for failures.

Using a phased approach can also help Google crawl through your new URLs one at a time. That way, you’ll know if the relaunch is working out or not. If it does, you can then move on to the next sections.

4. Use meta robots tags.

To prevent your site from getting penalized by Google, you need to make sure that you don’t duplicate your content by using the “no index” tag on the pages of your new site. This is like telling search engine crawlers to exclude the pages in their search results database.

Alternatively, if your site runs on WordPress, you can use the admin panel to use the “no index” value set for each page.

5. Update your Sitemap.

While updating your Sitemap is easy, it’s one of the most important tasks that people tend to forget. Your new XML Sitemap should include the new URLs of your new site.

To keep things organized, consider using different XML Sitemaps for different content types. Be sure to add your Sitemap location or index to your robots.txt file and Google Search Console. This is especially important if your Sitemap’s URLs have changed when you relaunched.

6. Connect your social media accounts.

Make sure your relaunched site is added to your social media accounts as a reference point. Your social media profiles must link back to your relaunched site to leverage your current online participation and branding to help drive traffic to your new site.

7. Take advantage of the email subscription/signup service.

Alert your target audience of your relaunch by taking advantage of your email subscription service. It’s important to inform your followers/subscribers though that you’ll be moving to a new site. Also, let them know how and where they’ll be able to access your content to gain permission to use their email details to create a mailing list on your new site.

You can entice more people to sign up for your email service by offering them exclusive access to content, videos, whitepapers, services, and the like.

Bottom line

Relaunching your site is often necessary in the ever-evolving world of digital marketing. For one, it helps your business deliver improved user experience, maintain relevance, and improve branding, to name a few. This doesn’t mean though that you hit the “Reset” button and redo everything at all once. Remember, you need to revamp your site without affecting your SEO efforts. This is why every step must be done carefully and efficiently at all times.