Why SEO Should Have Been Part of Your Original Website Design
The Intersection of Website Design and SEO
3 Overarching SEO Redesign Principles
Impact of a Website Redesign for SEO
How to Design a Website Without Losing SEO
One Word: Continuity
Another Word: Prevention
Quantifying Impacts
Pre- and Post-launch Quality Assurance
Website Redesign for SEO: It’s Not a Game, But It Can Be Fun
Is designing a website for SEO a significant undertaking today? Can’t a robot do that? These aren’t stupid questions, especially when website builders proclaim they give you website design for SEO. They couldn’t lie about that, could they?
Who hasn’t tried to do their own WordPress website design with a template and thought, “this is easy?”
Here’s the thing! Search engine optimization doesn’t come out of a box. If it did, we’d all rest comfortably on page one, which is a statistical impossibility.
“Everybody thinks their website is above average.” Matt Cutts (formerly of Google)
Many find out all too late that their website has limitations they didn’t realize were there. Limitations that hold back performance.
But, you’ve already paid for a website. You’re getting SOME traction and don’t want to lose it.
This is where website redesign for SEO is needed to break out of that slump without letting web redesign destroy your SEO.
I won’t share every action we take to redesign a website for SEO.
But I will share what you need to pay attention to and why.
Why SEO Should Have Been Part of Your Original Website Design
I don’t want to dwell on the past, because you mustn’t feel stuck there. However, it is important to share why SEO is critical to business success in the first place.
1. You’re Missing Out
I’ll ask you to think back. Why did you build this website in the first place? You wanted revenue, leads, or conversions. There’s no easy way to say this, but you are missing out. Even if you’re doing okay, you would be doing better if your website had been SEO’d from the start.
SEO is about so much more than search engine visibility. Real SEO is about building effortless customer experiences, eliminating user barriers, stoking brand engagement flames, and letting “free” organic visibility become your number one revenue stream.
Did you design your company’s site without considering organic search? A lot of people do. Perhaps you had a great idea and were hurrying to get it live? You just needed a website fast.
Maybe you realized from the start that you’d need to make some improvements later on.
You were going to figure it out as you went. And I don’t know how long it’s been for you, but it’s still not working like you thought.
Let’s not dwell on why, but we’ll learn from our failures (yes, it was a failure, and you’ll see why). But I want to see you move forward and stay positive.
Getting trapped in yesterday’s shame will hold you back. You can escape negativity and get this ship moving in the right direction.
2. You Expected ROI
Reason two? It was supposed to be an investment, not an expense. When business owners see something as an expense, they spend as little as humanly possible.
And honestly, that amounts to throwing money away (kind of like when you bought those low cost links from Fiverr). It won’t pay you back because you didn’t see it as an investment, so you didn’t want to pay a web development agency that knows how to build an ROI-focused website.
With an investment, you’re thinking, how can I maximize my ROI with this one-time cost? And that’s not the headspace you were in when you built your current website. If you had been, the dividends would have continued throughout your site’s lifetime.
But it’s not too late!
Take healthcare.gov as an example. I remember its launch well. It had serious user access issues. It was a PR nightmare. It took months and a lot of money to fix the problems. It was a waste of taxpayer money. And it was avoidable.
It seemed the developers and network architects had no idea how to build a website to manage 43.8 million uninsured Americans trying to use it all at once. Expert analysis of the situation has since determined that project managers underestimated the project’s scope and lacked an understanding of the technologies needed to build a website that could do what they needed.
You’re not going to be dealing with that kind of volume. But if your business suddenly goes viral due to an Oprah, Shark Tank, or Mr. Beast Effect, a lagging, crashing, or bad UX website means you can’t get the desired ROI from that amazing event.
3. Lack of Data and Learning
You could have gained valuable insights into your customer audience—what they search for, new keywords to target, and what products they like and dislike. You could have used the data in paid search campaigns. Like good wine, over time, you’d have been getting better, identifying wasted spending and optimizing your whole rev gen engine.
But if you neglected SEO, that didn’t happen.
Consider Zappos. They were investing in SEO and data analysis before most of us knew what SEO was. They learned what their audience was searching for and optimized their website around it. This not only increased their organic traffic but delivered more insights they could use to refine their landing pages and paid advertising.
If something wasn’t working, they knew quickly and would pivot before dropping too much money into projects that didn’t deliver ROI. They could get creative and defy business norms and best practices because they had the data to show what worked for them and didn’t.
4. Your Website Wasn’t Designed to Evolve
Depending on how long ago and how bad a shape your original site was in, you may not have had to redesign it at all. An SEO design is adaptable. But if you weren’t incorporating SEO from the start, you’ve probably been adding layers on top of layers of code that are bloating and hindering your Core Web Vitals stats (geeky metrics that Google developed to score UX issues).
It can’t adapt. It’s stuck in the Paleolithic times.
So, what do you do about it?
The Intersection of Website Design and SEO
See redesign is an opportunity, not a risk. Because it isn’t. The below is not an outlier.
Case Study: Website Redesign for SEO Increases Traffic by 515%
A company wanted to redesign its website without losing SEO because they knew it wasn’t performing like it should. After analyzing the website’s performance, the redesign team identified several clear-as-day barriers to traffic and conversions, including:
- People asked to submit a form with personal information before even entering the site.
- Ineffective meta descriptions appearing in search results.
- Confusing navigation.
- Duplicate content.
- Broken internal links delivering poor user experience.
The odds were completely against this website even being able to generate visitors. The SEO redesign team identified and corrected the obvious issues but also redesigned it from the ground up. Increasing the traffic was just the start. The redesign focused on helping the company generate the highest ROI from that traffic.
Now, your website probably isn’t this bad. But it goes to show the impact of a website design. Does website redesign affect SEO? I’ll let you answer that one.
3 Overarching SEO Redesign Principles
- Redesign websites without losing SEO. As much as you want to start from scratch, that’s not the answer. Even if your site underperforms, it’s better than nothing. Google looks at factors like the age of your website, the number of indexed pages, and how many inbound links point to your pages. If you aren’t careful, you could lose that momentum in a redesign. This leads to the second principle.
- Save what you can. Salvage everything you can from the old site. Take inventory of every page, link, and piece of content. Put it on a spreadsheet. Then start looking at what could be updated and improved to perform better in a redesigned website.
- Throw out the bad. Don’t be afraid to purge things that aren’t adding value. Now, as I mentioned earlier, it’s important to assess that value before cutting your roster. But you probably have some junk to purge. For example, you probably have old landing pages and orphaned content that is no longer relevant or accessible. Pruning them in line with SEO best practices may help.
Impact of a Website Redesign for SEO
Search engines, well, Google will likely detect your redesign and want to reevaluate your site. This is great because they will see your new and improved navigation and elevated user experience. Google will begin crawling your website to learn about it and start indexing pages in the search results. Those pages can then climb in the ranks as Google continues to see how users respond to them.
But what could go wrong?
How to Design a Website Without Losing SEO
Here are some of the most impactful SEO redesign considerations to watch out for.
1. URLs
Don’t try to improve URLs for SEO in your redesign. URLs are like highways. Search engines and people follow them to go somewhere. If that highway suddenly disappears, no one knows how to get to wherever it was taking them. Those would-be visitors will turn around and take the road that leads to your competitors instead.
Sometimes, there are reasons you want to change that URL. Maybe it’s an old-school one with all those random numbers and letters. You didn’t know about the importance of creating short, SEO-friendly URLs at the time. But even then, it’s generally inadvisable.
Google’s John Mueller puts it this way,
“If you’re an SEO {professional}, and billing by the hour to implement this change, then it’ll help your {the SEO professional’s} bottom line. Will it help the site? Very, very rarely (if they have terrible URLs that you can’t even copy & paste, maybe). Will a change negatively affect… Probably. Some risk + usually no gain = … ?”
If you can’t stand the URL, the best thing you can do is to redirect them one by one. Or use canonical methods in cases where you need a softer solution. With canonicals, you create a new page with the same content and create a canonical link in the text back to the original.
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://example.com/dresses/green-dresses” />
This isn’t just a theory. I saw this become very real for a client whose revenue had tanked, and they wanted to know why. A look at their Google Analytics data revealed that they’d deleted a high value URL many months prior. Because no one checked this first, they made a costly mistake.
2. Content
I mentioned pruning certain pages above. Be careful that you don’t end up deleting, hiding, or deemphasizing content critical to your sales funnel.
For example, clients may think that it’s a good idea to consolidate location pages into one page.
Whoa! Wait. But isn’t having one page better organized?
Sure.
However, location pages are critical for local SEO. They also generate localized experiences, ensuring people find the location-based resources they’re looking for.
Don’t change the content too terribly much when you launch your redesigned site.Wait until it’s live and been reevaluated by Google before making any serious semantic changes.
3. Design Structure and UI (User Interface) Changes
It’s common sense. People will take the path of least resistance. Less resistance or “friction” as conversion rate optimization people call it increases conversions. If you have important pages, then it’s better not to have them clicking and loading and clicking again to get where they need to go.
I’ll mention Healthcare.gov again because it’s a classic and one of my favorites. Originally, I understand that the website made visitors go through several pages to enroll in the program. Many people got frustrated and backed out. Because they backed out so quickly, the website didn’t even know who they were. So, the program administrators couldn’t even help them if they wanted to.
The team saw this and eliminated the pages between the home page and the initial sign-up, which drastically increased enrollment rates. Plus, the website had some contact information to follow up with people if they abandoned enrollment.
4. Meta Data
Failing to import metadata like title tags can cause the redesigned site’s CMS (like WordPress) to output defaults in their place. This metadata is “unseen” and easily forgotten, but it’s an important ranking factor. Lots more can be said about this but make sure you carry over the title and meta description tags for sure. You can compare the old site and new site by crawling them with a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
One Word: Continuity
The continuity principle of design states that a user’s eyes will travel in a predictable direction across the page. Great design uses a visual flow of information to guide the eyes to what’s important. This makes navigation effortless. But it can also directly impact conversions.
Have you ever visited a website and felt immediately overwhelmed and unsure where to look? Someone didn’t understand this principle.
Even the most beautiful website doesn’t convert if users experience chaos upon entering the page.
Now, continuity also applies to an individual customer’s feeling like they still know you. Your redesign should feel like a natural evolution of your old website. It’s important for things to feel familiar so customers aren’t messaging you about how “you’ve changed” and demanding the old site.
Then there’s business continuity. You want customers to experience no interruption as they do business with you.
Another Word: Prevention
Prevention is critical in website design for SEO because it helps avoid issues that can negatively impact user experience and business results. By proactively addressing potential problems, you can maintain site performance, ensure continuity, and protect your search rankings.
But here’s the thing. It takes a certain level of understanding and personal experience with many websites to know what you need to prevent and how to do it.
Quantifying Impacts
Bottom line: Your website is underperforming. But you want to redesign your website without losing what SEO you have.
So, how do I know what SEO I have?
Look at the pages indexed and getting visits first. Use Google Search Console for this. For the most part, these are the ones you need to protect. They’re already gaining traction in search results, even if they’re in average position 30. And it’s infinitely harder to start from square one.
What Pages Should Not Be Indexed on the New Site?
You want to look at the indexed pages. Are you seeing some pages that shouldn’t be indexed at all, like old landing or event pages? You need to check in Google Analytics to make sure that page isn’t driving traffic to your website. If it isn’t, you might consider redirecting that URL to a logical alternative on the site just to be safe.
But you don’t need that page.
Ultimately, you need to decide if you’ll take these pages to your redesigned website.
Disallow Crawling of Your Action URLs
This involved preventing search engines from crawling pages you’ve determined have no value for searchers.
Some pages that might require this action include:
- Search Results Pages: URLs generated by internal search queries.
- Login Pages: Pages requiring user authentication.
- Duplicate Content: URLs that generate similar or duplicate content.
- Temporary URLs: Session-based URLs that aren’t meant for permanent content.
- WordPress Archive pages
- Low performances pages: thin content with no keyword potential
Use the robots meta tag to noindex these. I usually like to use it with the “follow” directive so search engine crawlers can still crawl through and get to other pages if they want.
What URLs Should Remain Indexed and Be Flagged for Optimization?
This is perhaps the most important thing BEFORE the redesign is live, and you’ll want to have a spreadsheet of these handy because you’ll need it.
As you’re in Search Console, you might see (or not see) blog posts, location pages, etc., that you expected to see indexed. They’re not here. But they should be. In that case, you should look at those pages to see if:
- Google Search Console says why they were de-indexed
- They meet basic technical requirements for an indexed page
- They’re worth revisiting to improve the content value and indexing potential
- They have incoming links from other websites
These may be pages you want to save with a little historical optimization. You should prioritize making those changes before moving them to a redesigned site.
At the same time, take this opportunity to look for at-risk content. This is content that is performing now. But it’s not very good. Maybe Google is letting it slide for now. However, these are the kinds of pages that disappear when Google updates its algorithm. It’s best to get ahead of that.
At-risk content might include things like:
- Underwhelming imagery
- Bad formatting
- Outdated news
- Outdated references like “We’re all stuck in the house because of COVID.”
You don’t have to re-read everything to spot this content. Usually, a quick skim will tell you what you need to know.
These are especially worth polishing if they’re ranking for keywords that have a lot of impressions but low clickthrough. Improving the meta description may improve the clickthrough rate on this kind of content. Improving images, formatting, and outdated references can then improve engagement on a page. It feels fresh and new.
Pre- and Post-launch Quality Assurance
A redesign is like a space shuttle launch. It requires that kind of attention. Before the launch, I go through a checklist to make sure my team hasn’t missed anything. We’re testing everything as best we can without the site being live and then checking things after launch, too.
Here are some of those items.
Check everything with a crawler tool like the aforementioned Screaming Frog (especially URLs at post-launch).
Check syntax, protocol, subdomains (yes, www. is a subdomain), sitemaps, and canonical. A tool like Screaming Frog is great because it quickly identifies anomalies, allowing you to prioritize fixing any unforeseen issues fast.
Check it on mobile. Here’s the bitter truth. It doesn’t matter how much you love to browse the Internet on your desktop. Almost 2/3 of website traffic is now on mobile. This has been coming for a long time. Google will stop indexing sites that are no longer accessible on mobile.
Check the site on PageSpeed Insights. Identify any lagging pages and fix them before launch.
We use robots.txt to tell Google not to crawl the website until it’s ready. Blocking search engines during the development and staging phases prevents them from indexing incomplete or duplicate content. This could not only harm SEO performance in the short and long term. Real people could click on those incomplete, indexed pages, which might give a bad impression of your brand.
Once the site is ready for launch, remove these blocks so search engines can crawl and index your live, optimized content. This approach protects your SEO efforts by ensuring only your website’s final, polished version is indexed.
After launch, it’s still not over, and some problems will rear their heads afterward just when you think you’re in the clear.
Monitor your website with your favorite SEO Tool (I like SEMRush) and Google Search Console (It’s free). I start with the Performance and Indexing tabs. They’ll tell me if something isn’t right quickly, and I can fix it.
Also, keep an eye on Google Analytics. If your traffic drops overall or on a specific URL, return to your handy spreadsheet to see what you did on that page.
Website Redesign for SEO: It’s Not a Game, But It Can Be Fun
Learning to redesign website without losing SEO isn’t easy. But it can be a very smooth process when you take the right precautions and follow some evidence-based principles. You might feel a little worried about taking this leap.
But with the number of redesigns I’ve done, I can tell you that no one ever says, “Put the old site back”. Why would they? The improvement in your ability to meet important business goals is often immediate. You don’t know what you’re missing until you see this for yourself.
I want to emphasize continuity. Existing customers should be able to quickly find what they’re looking for, even if it moved. They know exactly where to look because your website is that intuitive.
I also want to double back to prevention. Does website redesign affect SEO? Always, always for the better when you take the right steps to redesign a website with no hit to SEO.
I’ll leave you with a shout-out to some favorite SEO tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, SEMRush, and Screaming Frog that make my job ten times easier. Some of these are free, and others aren’t, but I wouldn’t want to be doing this without them.
Website redesign doesn’t have to be risky with the right tools in the hands of the right people.
If your website is underperforming, it’s time to chat about your redesign.
