An SEO Checklist to Sail Smoothly Through Your Website Redesign and Relaunch
Embarking on relaunching another redesigned website for a client, I thought it would be a useful exercise for me to map out a pre-launch SEO checklist. Website redesign and relaunch is a significant undertaking that requires meticulous planning, especially when it comes to preserving and enhancing your site's SEO capabilities. Thus, as you prepare to give your website a fresh and appealing look, having an SEO checklist for your website redesign relaunch will save you from the risk of losing any of your hard-earned organic rankings and traffic.
This comprehensive guide presents a detailed SEO checklist that you should follow to ensure that your redesigned website not only maintains its SEO value but also enhances its performance in search engine result pages (SERPs).
By systematically addressing each step, from analysing your current website's SEO performance to monitoring post-launch metrics, you can ensure that your website redesign and relaunch sail smoothly toward SEO success.
1. Carry out a Comprehensive Audit of Your Current Website
1.1. Analyse Your Current Website's SEO Performance
Before you embark on a website redesign, it's crucial to conduct an in-depth analysis of your current website's SEO performance. This initial step will help you identify the strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement for your website's SEO strategy.
Use SEO tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or SE Ranking's Website Audit to get crucial insights about your website's traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, average session duration, page load speed, as well as other important SEO metrics.
1.2. Identify High-Performing Pages
An essential part of your website audit should involve identifying the high-performing pages on your website. These are pages that rank well in search engine result pages (SERPs) and attract a significant amount of organic traffic.
You can use tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SE Ranking's Keyword Rank Tracker to identify these high-performing pages. Once identified, these pages should be prioritised during the redesign process to ensure their SEO value is preserved.
1.3. Conduct a Content Audit
A content audit is a systematic review of all the content on your website. This process involves evaluating the relevance, quality, and SEO performance of your content.
During a content audit, you should identify content that is outdated, irrelevant, or low-performing and plan for their improvement or removal. On the other hand, high-performing content should be optimised further to boost their SEO performance.
2. Set Clear and Measurable SEO Goals
2.1. Define Your SEO Goals
Setting clear and measurable SEO goals is an essential step in your website redesign process. Your SEO goals should align with your overall business objectives and should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
Some common SEO goals during a website redesign may include improving organic search rankings, increasing organic traffic, reducing bounce rate, improving user engagement, and increasing conversion rates.
2.2. Establish SEO Benchmarks
Establishing SEO benchmarks involves defining the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you will use to measure the success of your SEO goals. These KPIs may include organic traffic, bounce rate, average session duration, page load time, conversion rate, and rankings for target keywords.
3. Plan Your Site's Information Architecture
The information architecture of your website refers to how your website's content is organised and structured. A well-planned information architecture enhances user experience by making your website easy to navigate and understand.
During the website redesign process, you should review and revise your website's information architecture to ensure it aligns with your SEO goals. This may involve updating your site's navigation, hierarchy of information, URL structure, and page layout.
4. Map Your Redirects
When redesigning a website, it's inevitable that some URLs will change. To prevent broken links and maintain the SEO value of these URLs, you need to implement 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another, and it ensures that users and search engines are directed to the correct page.
During the website redesign process, you should map out all the necessary 301 redirects from the old URLs to the corresponding new URLs. This process should be carried out meticulously to ensure that no page is left out, and no link equity is lost.
5. Prioritise Mobile-Friendliness
With the increasing dominance of mobile internet usage, having a mobile-friendly design for your website is non-negotiable. A mobile-friendly website not only provides a better user experience for mobile users but also improves your website's SEO performance.
During your website redesign, ensure that your site is designed to be responsive. This means that the site should automatically adjust to fit the screen sise of the device it is being viewed on. You can check your website's mobile-friendliness using Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
6. Optimise Your On-page SEO Elements
On-page SEO involves optimising various elements on your website's pages to improve their search engine visibility. These elements include meta titles, meta descriptions, headings, URLs, image alt tags, and content.
During your website redesign, ensure that these on-page SEO elements are optimised appropriately. This involves incorporating relevant keywords, ensuring the meta titles and descriptions are compelling, and the URLs are SEO-friendly.
7. Implement a Robust Internal Linking Strategy
Internal linking refers to the process of linking one page on your website to another page on the same website. A robust internal linking strategy can boost your SEO performance by helping search engines understand the structure of your website, distributing link equity across your website, and improving user navigation.
During your website redesign, ensure that you implement an effective internal linking strategy. This involves ensuring that all pages are adequately linked, anchor texts are optimised, and broken links are fixed.
8. Enhance Your Website's Loading Speed
Website loading speed is a critical factor in both SEO and user experience. A slow-loading website can lead to a high bounce rate, low user engagement, and poor search engine rankings.
During your website redesign, take steps to enhance your site's loading speed. This can involve optimising images, minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, leveraging browser caching, and improving server response time.
9. Update Your XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the URLs on your website, making it easier for search engines to find, crawl and index your site's content. If your website redesign involves adding, removing or changing URLs, it's vital to update your XML sitemap to reflect these changes.
Once your XML sitemap is updated, submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. This will help search engines quickly discover and index your new and updated pages.
10. Monitor Post-Launch Performance
After launching your redesigned website, it's crucial to closely monitor its performance to identify any potential issues and ensure that your SEO goals are being met.
Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track key metrics like organic traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, page load time, and keyword rankings. If you notice a significant drop in these metrics after the launch, it could indicate a problem with your website redesign that needs immediate attention.
Summary
In conclusion, a website redesign and relaunch isn't just a cosmetic makeover and straightforward swap of one site design for another; it's an opportunity to reinvent and enhance your digital identity. A website redesign is a significant project that can greatly improve your online presence, user experience, and SEO performance.
However, to ensure a successful redesign, it's crucial to carefully plan and execute every step of the process. Following each heckpoint on this SEO checklist will help to safeguard your existing website’s achievements whilst also ensuring that your new website is primed for SEO success.
