Website redesign: impact on SEO rankings?
-
Hi
We're redesigning a website for a client whose SEO rankings are fairly strong, and are driving a good volume of enquiries through their website. We would like to do our best to ensure the redesign has a minimal impact on the rankings but aren't sure if there's anything in particular we should be doing to avert a severe dip in results. The content will be similar on many pages, with the major updates being from 2013 products to the 2014 suite. Layouts and images will, of course be updated, and we're going to do our best to keep the inbound links going to the correct place - any advice here would be much appreciated, too.
We'd be really grateful for any suggestions for how to avoid a ranking disaster, and any major pitfalls we should look out for.
Many thanks.
-
I agree with EGOL. I think that a new design should improve User experience on the site and all related metrics. In this case we're speaking about the same list EGOL says, from bounce rate to conversion rate and from time on site to internal navigation. This should be tested using an A/B platform or whatever ensures you're not changing from one day to another without knowing the effect of the new design. This requires good tools and time (optimizely may be one).
A new design may also improve SEO rankings and in my opinion this means, all changes made in development of the site:
- SPEED: improving CSS and javascripts, using of sprites and the things which may help you speeding up your site (google loves that!)
- URL REDESIGN: if URLs are completely messed up it could be good to review them and write more user friendly URLs. BEWARE! this may cause your rankings to dance a bit, due to 301s and changes effects. 301s can be set up in a wrong way and even if set up correctly may lose some value of the old page, so if you really NEED to update your URLs structure be sure of the benefits of that. If you're not sure DON'T CHANGE THEM.
- EXPERIENCE: It's a really great opportunity to make the most of mobile increasing traffic and build a responsive UI, compelling with experiences throughout all the devices.
All of the above can be an additional value but consider design as an effect mainly focused on improving user experience.on the site rather than googlebot. Try to improve user experience metrics and to not HURT SEO this by maintaining the code as it is, improving it but not changing it, without changes on site contet, without changingn meta data and URL (if you don't have a clear plan on how to take advantage of that change), hope this helps!
-
Hi, perhaps I should have specified that it's a short term dip we're concerned about - 2/3 weeks - rather than long term. Our goal is to improve the performance of the site, of course, and enhance the user experience whilst, hopefully, driving more business for our client. Thanks for your response and suggestions.
-
We recently redesigned a site which had strong rankings and learnt a valuable lesson about defining URL parameters using webmaster tools.
Basically, the new site used filters and this caused a whole load of duplicate content, causing the site to drop from postion 1-3 for every core keyword to approx position 8-10.
I didn't even know that tool existed until i asked on Moz and its been a lifesaver.
-
"We would like to do our best to ensure the redesign has a minimal impact on the rankings but aren't sure if there's anything in particular we should be doing to avert a severe dip in results."
A design change is the time when you should be striving to improve the rankings - not worrying about a "severe dip in results".
You should be looking to improve your...
** on-page optimization
** internal navigation
** visitor time-on-site
** bounce rate
** conversion rate
** htaccess and CMS to prevent duplicate URLs and other problems
You need a plan to IMPROVE every one of these.
If you have any doubts about how to improve these then you might want to hire someone who has successfully done the redesign of many sites and understands how improvements in the design that will lift the rankings.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Rankings Dropped to Nothing
We're kind of in crisis mode, as our ad revenue is about to take a huge hit. Hoping someone can help me figure out what to do next. Site: https://indoorgardening.com Here's what I did (below) that I think broke things somehow. I'm clearly not an SEO expert but thought I was making things better. And things did improve over the last week or so but then fell apart 2 days ago. 1. Most posts did not have a Yoast focus keyword. I added keyword phrases and used Yoast suggestions to optimize for that and for readability. 2. In some cases I changed post titles to better reflect the keyword phrase. 3. In some cases I changed the slug per Yoast's suggestion and did a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one. 4. I used Grammarly to fix all spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. 5. Some Yoast-suggested changes that were made: Image alt tags, subheading structures, adding keyword to subheadings, first paragraph, and meta description, changed sentence length for those over 20 words to clean up the text, added transition words where applicable, reworded passive voice sentences, added internal links when needed, eliminated consecutive sentences (first word), improved Flesch reading ease when necessary. 6. I also added or changed Amazon affiliate links where needed and swapped out images when necessary. Results:
Technical SEO | | Jbyron
I started this project about 3 weeks ago. On 11/29 we had one of our highest traffic days, with 1017 hits coming from Google. On 11/30, 257 hits came from Google, and on 12/1, 3 (three!!) hits came from Google. At this point, 82 of 89 posts have a double green "Good" score in Yoast; 6 are "OK" and 1 does not have a focus keyword designated. Thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide. -John0 -
Please who can help me rank my website www.shopdocuments.com ?
Hi , i bought my website this month , i built it myself now i want it to grow seo on google pages and stuff tried google ads but they always block my account don't know why so somebody help me please any company? individual willing to work it for me ? even if paid company no problem
Technical SEO | | planetdocs1 -
Acquired domains for SEO
hi there, For one of our insurance websites we acquired a domain, this domain is going to be redirected to our domain. After some research we discovered the domain we've bought also includes other domains which 301 redirect to specific 'insurance products'. These domains are also included in the deal. But what is the best technical solution for redirecting these specific redirected product domains? They already redirect to the product pages of the domain we've bought, so after redirect this domain, the sub (product) redirected domains will also link to us. It would be like this: A) www.sub-carinsurancesite.nl (301) -> www.domain-we-bought.com/car-insurance -> www.ourdomain.com/car-insurance
Technical SEO | | remkoallertz
B) www.sub-carinsurancesite.nl (301) -> www.ourdomain.com/car-insurance & www.domain-we-bought.com/car-insurance -> www.ourdomain.com/car-insurance etc0 -
Why my site is not ranking for any of the keywords?
We have a site for Property management software, we have done everything like set proper Title and descriptions, heading tags, robots tag is also ok, set schema and its ok with Google webmaster too also we are doing Social media promotion. can you please check our website and tell me what is the problem??
Technical SEO | | rootwaysinc0 -
Canonicalization on my website
I am kind of new to all this but I would like to understand canonicalization. I have a website which when you arrive on it is www.mysite.com but once inside and flicking back to the homepage it reverts to www.mysite.com/index.html. Should I be doing something re canonicalization? If so what? Will the link juice be diluted by having two home page versions? Thanks
Technical SEO | | FCAbroad0 -
Is pointing multiple domains to a single website beneficial for SEO or not?
A client has purchased many domains with keywords in each. They want to have us point each domain to their site for better SEO. Is this a good or bad thing to do?
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup0 -
Help Website Plumetting :(
Hi I have been smacked by the penguin/panda and traffic plumetted back in April/May. We are still trying to recover and am looking at all of the potential issues. I have since cleaned up the site as much as i can and attempted to remove as much duplicate content as possible which is automatically generated by Zencart. We add content regularly and have new product reviews everyday and all product page are kept fresh as they show the last 12 customers engraving details which change daily on popular items. Could someone give me some pointers as i am hitting my head against the wall and only seeing traffic drop all the time, it's soul destroying just how much work i am putting into this every day without any effect. Site is www.keepitpersonal.co.uk Kind Regards Andy
Technical SEO | | SmithyWhiffy0 -
Site redesign/cleanup SEO Advice
Hi Everyone, New member here, but loving it. I have some questions that I couldn't find the answers to. We are radically changing our site. Over the years it has accumulated thousands of garbage files, WP installations, etc. We enjoy good rankings for lots of our keywords. Are there articles/advice/suggestions on how to do this with the least harm to our rankings? One of the largest concerns is for pages currently ranked and we want to move them to blog posts with a preceding /blog/ in the url. The filename, title, etc. will all remain identical. the url is www.wulongforlife.com Sure appreciate any advice. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | okuma0