Website Redesign – How To Avoid An SEO Disaster

Redesigning a new website can be an exciting chapter for any business or webmaster. It’s an opportunity to refresh your brand, but, if you don’t take account of the necessary SEO best practises it can quickly turn into a nightmare.

Your entire organic rankings and website traffic can be destroyed overnight when launching your new redesigned site, and that can be catastrophic for any business.

Worst of all, building it all back up to where it once was, isn’t as easy as it is to destroy it – which is why in this scenario, prevention is better than the cure.

Reasons Your Website Rankings Might Tank

Mistake #1: Flash or unoptimised images

Do not make the mistake of using flash images, not only are they not mobile friendly but they’re also not SEO friendly. And since the release of the Google’s Mobilegeddon algorithm, which favours websites which are mobile friendly, you can begin to understand why flash images are a big no-no.

Large file images which are not saved for web also fall under the ‘unoptimised’ category. They can drastically affect your website’s loading speed – and a slow site will cause high bounce rates!

Mistake #2: Neglected to import important content

We all know that in order to have a successful website the content on all the pages need to be relevant, unique and targeted to your audience. This includes the hidden content too – alt text, metadata etc.

Redesigning your website gives you the opportunity to refresh weak content but it’s also critical that you transfer over strong content that is contributing well to your organic search.

Mistake #3: Blocked search engines from crawling site

Of course when you’re developing your site you wouldn’t want search engines crawling it, but it only takes the simple mistake of forgetting to disable robots.txt from blocking search engines crawling your new redesigned site to bring your traffic to a halt.

Mistake #4: Not mobile friendly

As previously mentioned, the infamous Mobilegeddon algorithm by Google – which prioritises mobile-friendly websites – caught the SEO world by storm. Adobe released a report which found that websites that were not optimised for mobile experiences a decrease of up to 10% in organic traffic.

A plan is all you need…

Do not be discouraged from redesigning your website, with the correct groundwork in place and a list of final checks, you can almost guarantee a safe transition.

Written byTony Conte

Founder and Owner of Brave Agency, an Integrated Agency transforming businesses through design, digital and marketing, helping you, our clients to get results by applying the right strategy.

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