A Step-by-Step Guide on Website Redesign SEO Checklist

SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is the process to help content or websites rank higher on Google. No matter what business it is, the higher rank leads to increased visibility and improving the site. Companies and businesses try to hire SEO specialists to work on strategies for boosting organic traffic. 

Also, some SEO tools like Google Trends, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and UberSuggest can help businesses get organic rankings. Because SEO involves organic rankings.

Make Sure If Your Server Supports the New Design

To make sure that your server supports the new design includes software and hardware testing. Hardware testing entails verifying the design of the server’s real hardware devices. Software testing is done to determine whether or not an application meets the design specifications.

When you want to change your site from a server to another one, in the process of a website redesign, you should keep your site in a testing mode until you see no errors, for example, the shop orders and receiving or sending emails to run without problems.

Create a Temporary Development URL

Having a temporary development URL can help you in the pre-launch phase. So never redesign the existing website. You better redesign it on a different URL. And also you can start to make changes to your website. Thus it prevents visitors from having issues.

You can get help from your developer or get help from a hosting company like website development company in Australia to do it for you if there is a chance that you may struggle with this. It is critical that you request that your hosting provider perform the setup for you, as this will prevent you from future problems.

Don’t Delete Old Content

The old content should be where they are now. A good thing you can do is to improve it. If you want to delete your old blog post, think of all the history that you gathered. Because content is essential for SEO, and deleting portions of your content may result in a blog with content from one or two years ago. And even think about all the backlinks you give, the backlinks turn to broken links.

Use your old content. It’s easier to improve it rather than write new content. Then you can look out for a proper keyword to rank for and optimize it.

Keywords

To organize the keywords that you choose you can start a keyword mapping. Make a list of 100 high-ranking pages and then write the important keyword for each article. After that research for possible keywords for each page.

The keyword strategy is the foundation of SEO. It’s better to don’t address more than one keyword per page; to conduct semantic content optimization, make sure your material focuses on a particular term and its variations like singular form, plural form, and synonym. In keyword strategy, you should pick the highest search keywords that are related to your business. Check the singular and plural forms of keywords to be sure you choose the right word.

Set Up 301 Redirects

You should do 301 redirects between old and new URLs. During the redesign, check out if both of the URLs are working or not, because if one of them doesn’t work you lose SEO benefits gained from your previous URL. If you do it wrong, search engines will get 404 web pages not found. 

The 301 redirect helps the old URL redirect to a new one. This technical way tells the search engines that the URL changes now. 

For instance, when you want to change your old “About Us” page into a new one. Turn “www.yourwebsite.com/aboutus.html.” to “www.yourwebsite.com/about-us.html.” first check that they are working. 

Website Accessibility

Let’s say people with certain disabilities are visiting your website, how would they access it? Website accessibility is indeed a very important aspect of a website that allows people with disabilities access your website and its content. You need to make sure that your website is accessible for all people as it’ll help you with business perspectives as well and WCAG compliance as well. To achieve this feat, you need to hire the services of a specialist company like “XCompliant” that can help your website comply with the latest ADA WCAG compliance guidelines and standards, as set by the US federal law. This can help save you from future lawsuits, and make your site increasingly accessible to a wider audience, especially persons with vision related disabilities. And, one such expert can help install an accessibility app or plugin within seconds, and integrate it with your existing CMS. This article will give you a much better idea about web accessibility and WCAG compliance: The Ultimate WCAG Compliance Guide! This has been published by Accessibility Spark and a good article to understand the basic concept of WCAG & ADA standards.

Set Analytics Goals

 Goals are essential metrics for your site. Don’t forget to set goals when your site URL may change or even try to set up new goals. You can see a maximum of 20 goals per reporting view, but if you need to track more, you should create another view for that property. If you want to delete a goal you better know that you can’t, but you can stop it from tracking. 

Test The New Site

Now that you turn your existing website into a new one, it is a good time to do an end-to-end checkup of your site. You should look at the errors, broken links, features, mistakes like different fonts, wrong spacing, wrong image, wrong color, etc. Checking, testing, and visually inspecting your new website is an essential step; you’ve probably done it before, do it one more time.

Crawl the New Website, Audit It and Compare the Result

Crawl the new site to fix issues and problems a couple of months in. Just like your old website, you need to make an audit for your new website too. You can use tools like Moz for your site audit.

After the site audit, you need to compare the jumper of indexed links and the results. Given that you haven’t deleted or added any content, the number of pages crawled should be the same as it was on the previous site. Look for any unresolved and unfixed errors and issues, such as missing titles, descriptions, alt tags, and so forth.

Check and Compare Search Traffic

How much search traffic do you have compared with the previous website? Use Search Console and your Analytics data to compare the results. If you change the domain, you can export the data from the pre-launch phase into a CSV file and compare it to the data you currently have. If you did not change your domain, you could compare your statistics directly from Google Analytics.

Compare Your SEO Visibility

Examine your SEO visibility to see whether it has decreased or increased. This comparison allows you to quickly analyze market trends and digital marketing techniques, regardless of whether they are part of a marketing automation strategy or not. SEO visibility is measured using millions of keywords recorded by Google, their traffic volume and importance, and all ups and downs are connected with Google algorithm changes.

Use Additional Tools

Once your new site is set up, make sure to use some additional tools to further optimize the site. For an example, different platforms come with different options. WordPress offers Plugins like Yoast to make your website SEO compatible which helps it rank higher in search results. Ecommerce platforms like Shopify comes with various in-built apps that you can use to further optimize your store. For an example, TADA, Oberlo, Trident AB are some of the cool apps that comes with a lot of features and help you improving your conversions and sales in no time. Here’s a quick guide for you: 15 A/B Testing Tools for E-Commerce You Need to Use in 2022. This has been originally published by Trident AB and will give you some good insights about A/B testing tools to optimize your ecommerce store.

Last Words

As an owner of a company you better think about how to take your business online and SEO checklist. 

Having a website and trying to grow may be a full-time job; with a perfect plan and professional team such as well-known designers and experienced developers, you can grow your site and your business as simply as possible.

Google search engine optimization is the fundamental process that the crawlers of Google do. Try to update by a new Google algorithm that changes once in a while.