The Essentials of Site Redesign and Rebranding
Let’s say you’ve had the same website design for the past five years and the same URL for about fifteen years. Now, would you ever dare just go ahead and let a developer with no SEO input from your team re-design a whole new site or let an external agency oversee a company-wide rebranding without taking heed of the digital duties? Depending on if you use tools like Search Metrics of SEMRush, you can tell just how successful a rebranding or redesign was by seeing if the change-over resulted in a massive dip in keyword reach and organic traffic.
So what are some crucial strategies to keep in mind when pursuing a redesign or rebranding? Firstly, it’s essential to have benchmarks, meaning the average organic sessions and users over the past twelve months alongside the bounce rate and average organic revenue. These will become your roadmaps to charting your success, or failure if you fail to follow these next few steps.
One common mistake that is often made when restructuring a website is taking down whole sections or categories from your site, which can affect tens to thousands of pages and plenty of vibrant traffic sources. Before removing any page on your website, look at the average sessions and users over the past twelve months and if their traffic is above the benchmarks you’ve already set, then hold onto those pages.
Another extremely common mistake is to screw up your 301 redirects, sending users to a dreaded 404 page. Before making any changes, map out your old website alongside your new website URL’s and indicate which ones will receive redirects.
Yet another common problem that sites cause themselves is to completely remove the keyword optimization that had previously been done to a page, removing all the formerly-optimized title tags, header tags, content, alt tags, and meta descriptions. As you are putting in the time to create a new and structurally-sound website, make sure each page of the site is optimized according to a specific keyword and have it all planned out in advance, so if a page is already, or closely, optimized to how you have it planned, you’ll know better than to just trash it.
Finally, when launching the new site, don’t ever, ever remove your current Google Analytics code, unless you want to lose all of your previous GA data. As it is crucial to testing your benchmarks and such, never touch that code. From there, once the site is launched, run another Screaming Frog crawl to check for any leftover 404s and do a fetch & render in Google Webmaster Tools to ensure each type of page on your site is functioning correctly. And stay vigilant during those first six-twelve months as that is the time to really do your best to ensure your site traffic either stays steady or grows substantially.
