When should I start thinking about SEO for a new site? Will I lose my rankings on Google when I relaunch my website? What are 301 redirects and why do they matter?
These are just a few of the questions I receive when talking to business owners and marketing managers about the impact of a new website on SEO. As an SEO agency owner, I’ve worked with hundreds of businesses as they redesigned and relaunched their websites. It’s my favorite type of project because there is the opportunity for growth and the risk of a decline.
When a website is refreshed, a lot changes. Often, a website refresh means a new design, new URLs, and new content — a reimagined user experience. While these changes are typically for the better in terms of SEO— a move to a faster, more secure, more user-friendly website — the immediate impact is a lot of change. Google and the search engines can get lost in the shuffle along the way. This can mean anywhere from weeks to months to even a year of decreased traffic and reduced visibility on Google.
Fortunately, by weaving SEO into a website redesign project, you can mitigate the potential for lost traffic and position the new website for immediate growth.
The challenge is that moving in parallel with SEO alongside a website redesign project adds complexity. There may be multiple team members or agencies involved. There is added cost — whether it’s more time or the cost of hiring an agency.
Fortunately, the upside is invaluable. Think of building a website as similar to building a house. If you know you want solar power, it’s best to integrate this into the design and build of the house at the beginning of the project. Of course, you can install solar power later, but there will be an added cost to adapt it to your house, and you will have lost the months or years when you weren’t collecting the solar gain.
The best way to reduce the complexity of SEO for a website redesign is to follow a standard process. Here’s an outline of the process our agency, webShine, follows for website redesign projects. Whether you are a business owner or marketing manager taking a do-it-yourself approach to SEO or you are a web designer building a website for clients, this website redesign SEO checklist will help you navigate a seamless transition.
Website Redesign SEO Checklist
PHASE I: STRATEGY
Invest in these tasks immediately as a website redesign project begins.
1. Establish the Baseline
Set up Google Analytics and the Google Search Console to better understand your current traffic. Both are free tools from Google.
Google Analytics provides general website performance statistics, such as the number of sessions your website receives, the traffic sources responsible for it, and the performance of each page.
Google Search Console is an SEO-specific platform that helps you understand what keywords drive traffic to your current website and which pages are most important. It is also a communication channel with the search engine, providing feedback on how your site is crawled and indexed.
The key questions to answer are:
- What percentage of my current traffic comes from organic search?
- Is my organic search traffic increasing, decreasing, or staying the same over the past 12 months?
- What are my top-performing landing pages?
- What keywords drive traffic to my website? How important are these to my business?
Understanding the starting point ensures you can take a do-no-harm approach to the website redesign. For example, if you have a blog leading to 90% of your traffic and that traffic is performing well, you know you’ll need to focus on a solid blog migration to the new website. Alternatively, if your website only receives traffic for brand-related keywords, you’ll know that that’s easy to preserve and that you can only go up from here with the new site.
2. Invest in Keyword Research
Keyword research is the backbone of your SEO strategy. It is the process of establishing what words and phrases your audience uses to search for your business.
Keyword research can be overwhelming, as many tools and data need to be analyzed to craft your strategy. My recommendation is that you start simply.
You have the Google Search Console set up so you can see what keywords people are searching for now and how they reach your website. Analyze that data.
Then, turn to google.com and start typing in seed phrases to see what other phrases Google suggests in your keyword space. This is brainstorming, and it's the most important step in keyword research. Write the phrases down and think critically about them. If a visitor comes to your website from keyword A, what impact will it have on your business? Is the keyword specific enough that your website stands a chance at ranking for it? Are there other phrases or synonyms that relate to it?
Take, for example, this blog post; the primary keyword is “SEO checklist for a website redesign”, but it’s optimized around a cluster of phrases:
- website redesign SEO
- SEO website relaunch
- site redesign SEO checklist
- website relaunch SEO checklist
- website redesign SEO checklist
- SEO for website redesign
As you invest in keyword research, start a spreadsheet to store your SEO work. We call it an SEO Workbook at our agency. Keyword research can be your first tab.
3. Apply an SEO Lens to your Sitemap
While designing a new website, you should invest in a plan — that is, a sitemap. This is a list of all the pages on your new website, their structure and how they fit together. It should also include how the navigation is structured.
The sitemap is often created with user experience and business needs as the priorities, which is great. Now, analyze the sitemap from an SEO standpoint. Are all of the page types that are important to your current site included? Will you create any new pages that will allow you to position yourself into new keyword spaces?
Google indexes and displays webpages, not websites. It’s important to have pages dedicated to clusters of like keywords so Google has a strong fit between the keyword a user is searching for and the best-fit page on your website for them to land on. Here’s an example. If you were building a website for a service-based business like a roofing contractor, you would decide during the sitemap phase if you will have one services page that outlines all of your services or if you’ll have a page for each service. If you offer sub-services like residential roofing, commercial roofing, roof maintenance, and roof repair, then you’ll want to create a page for each because you know that people look for keywords such as “roof repair in San Diego” or “residential roofer in San Diego” and that their best experience would be a page specific to those services.
4. Crawl the Live Website with Screaming Frog
We want to create a list of all of the pages on your existing website, along with pertinent information such as the title tags and meta descriptions. The easiest way to do this is with a tool called Screaming Frog. The free version is sufficient for most websites. Download the tool, scan your website, and export the HTML information. Store this for future use in a tab in your SEO workbook.
5. Set Up Rank Tracking
Start tracking your keyword performance. Now that you have a list of the keywords that are important to you start tracking your rankings. SEO software such as Pathfinder SEO lets you track your keyword performance over time. We want to start tracking this data now so we have a before and after picture. Learn more about rank tracking.
PHASE II: PRE-LAUNCH
Pace this work as the new site comes together.
6. Apply an SEO Lens to the Content
Just as we did with the sitemap, we also want to apply an SEO lens to the content for your new website. Are you utilizing your keywords in the content? Review your website copy, paying particular attention to pages with a high opportunity to be organic landing pages. For example, the homepage, services, location, and product collection pages. Wordsmith the copy to ensure you use the phrases you want to rank for. You don’t need to repeat the exact words over and over. Aim to use synonyms and keep the content reader-friendly, not SEO-friendly.
7. Create 301 redirects.
The search engines have indexed all of the pages on your existing website. They will keep going to these URLs and expect to find the pages intact. These pages also have authority, and we want to pass that on to your new website's pages. An essential step in successfully launching a new website is creating 301 redirects.
A 301 redirect moves visitors and search engines from one URL to a new one. For example, if your current contact page is at /contact-us and the new website's URL will be /contact, we need to redirect /contact-us to /contact.
You have a list of your existing URLs from the ScreamingFrog export. Use this list to determine what URLs will be changing. Select a corresponding new URL that maps nicely for every URL that changes.
Once you have your list, you can implement the 301 redirects into your development site. Yoast SEO Premium offers easy redirect management if your site is built on WordPress. There are also stand-alone plugins, such as Redirection, that work well. Other platforms, such as Squarespace, Shopify, and Wix, have built-in redirection management.
Be sure to have your 301 redirects in place before the site goes live.
8. Add Alternative Text to Images
Alternative text is the content behind an image that describes it for a screen reader. It’s a best practice of website accessibility to add alternative text to all images on your website and the search engines value accessible websites.
Ideally, alternative text is added to images uploaded to your new website. Go through the media library to ensure this is the case. If you have images that are missing alternative text, fill in these fields for each image.
9. Draft & Implement Page Titles & Meta Descriptions
These are fields in the header HTML of each page on your website. They are utilized by the search engines when they market your pages on the search engine results pages.
Draft your title tags and meta descriptions in a spreadsheet and implement them on your development site. You can focus on the most important pages if your website is large.
PHASE III: IMMEDIATELY AFTER LAUNCH
Complete these tasks on the day of your site launch.
10. Add Google Analytics to Your New Website
Use your existing Google Analytics account. We like using Google Tag Manager to implement Google Analytics.
Ideally, you also configure conversions or key events at this time.
11. Verify the Website with the Google Search Console
If your domain stays the same, then you'll likely need to update the verification method.
12. Create and Submit an XML Sitemap
This file acts as your website's resume. It includes a list of all pages on your new website that you'd like the search engines to crawl and index.
If your site is built with WordPress, you'll want to use your SEO plugin of choice to create and configure your XML sitemap.
You have a built-in XML sitemap if your site is built with Squarespace, Shopify, or Wix. Simply navigate to the help section of your site and search for the XML sitemap to get detailed information on how to access it.
Once you have your XML sitemap URL, log in to the Google Search Console and submit it.
12. Test your 301 Redirects
Go to google.com and search for site:mydomain.com. This will pull up all of the URLs that Google has indexed. Start clicking on each URL to test to ensure you don't hit any page not found errors. If you do, note it and add a 301 redirect for it.
If you have a small website, this is quick and easy as there aren't many pages to test. If your site is large, then this could be time-consuming. You don't have to test all pages. Just test the top 50 links and look for a pattern. If you only hit one or two page not found errors, then your initial work on 301 redirects was thorough, and you're all set. If they are all page not found errors, then your initial work needs additional follow-up, as those redirects may not work correctly.
Once all your URLs appear properly indexed and are displaying in search results, it's time to move into the monitoring phase of the SEO checklist for a website redesign.
PHASE IV: MONITOR RESULTS
In the weeks after the site launch, invest in these tasks to ensure a smooth transition.
13. Analyze the Data
You have set up Google Analytics, the Google Search Console, and rank tracking. Watch the data every week to look for trends. You can expect some volatility in a week or two after the website relaunch. Then, your rankings should stabilize (ideally better than before).
14. Communicate with Your Team
As you watch the results, communicate regularly with your team. If it's good news, then it's fun to celebrate the win with all. If you have cause for concern, it's better to be in front of this. Note what you found and what you are doing in response. For example, maybe you found a rapid increase in page not found errors in the Coverage report of the Google Search Console after launch. Let your team know and get back to work on your 301 redirects.
15. Keep Investing in New Content
A new site launch is a time for celebration, but it's not the end of the road. Now, it's time to keep evolving. Content is one of the most powerful ways to evolve your website and its ability to rank. And it's how you share your expertise. Expertise that Google values.
