A website redesign is often one of two things. When done right, a redesign is a chance to improve your search engine optimization, SEM, conversion rates and digital marketing. When things go awry, site redesign is an invitation for disaster to strike and pull the figurative rug out from under the SEO equity your website has built up over time. Clearly, the first result is preferable to the latter scenario.
Luckily, there are some things you can do that will increase the likelihood that your redesign will be successful rather than disastrous.
Use a Responsive Design
If you haven’t already adopted a responsive web design, now is the time to do so. A responsive design enables people to have the same experience when they visit your site no matter what kind of device or browser they’re using. Using a responsive design is an absolute must to compete in today’s connected marketplace, and it’s a good way to future-proof your website as new devices are rolled out down the line.
Make Your Site User-Friendly
User experience is one of the factors that search engines like Google use to rank websites in search engine results pages. If your website isn’t user-friendly, the odds are good the unfriendly nature of your website is hurting your SEO results.
Incorporate Schema
According to Moz, Schema or Schema.org is “a semantic vocabulary of tags (or microdata) that you can add to your HTML to improve the way search engines read and represent your page in SERPs.” When you add Schema to your code, it will improve the way your website displays in SERPs. That’s because the markup will improve the rich snippets that appear below the titles of your webpages.
Keep Things the Same
While the point of a redesign is to change things up, you should try to keep some things the same. If your current content ranks well in SERPs, you’ll want to avoid changing your content. If possible, you should also avoid changing your URLs and the names of your webpages.
By crawling your old site, you can export all the essential on-page elements to your new website pretty easily, such as your meta descriptions and headers. Unless it’s obvious that these things can use some improvement, try to keep them the same as well.
Do your best to keep your internal link structure the same, too. If your old webpages had a lot of links but your new ones don’t, it can have a dramatic impact on where your pages land in SERPs.
Submit Your Sitemap to Google and Bing
When your redesigned site is close to going live, be sure you submit your revised XML sitemap to Google and Bing. Doing so will help search engines understand your new website much faster, which can prevent your site from losing its enviable position in SERPs.
Contact DB Marcom for Responsive Web Design in Frisco
When you choose DB Marcom for responsive web design in Frisco or a nearby area, you’re gaining a partner that’s intimately familiar with all the latest SEO best practices. Our knowledge coupled with our web design skills enable us to create and redesign websites for businesses operating in a wide array of industries. To schedule a free consultation about revamping your website, contact DB Marcom today.