The company website is going to need a redesign a few times during the lifetime of the business. Losing rankings when relaunching a website can be a huge concern for a business that has invested heavily in digital marketing. Ranking on search engines is immensely important for companies looking for organic leads that come directly from online searches. Ranking at the top of search engines is very important as searchers rarely scroll through the first few results if they find what they were looking for. Below are tips to relaunch your company website without losing rankings.
Website Performance Metrics
Losing rankings could be perceived if you do not have concrete data. Data will allow you to know where the website redesign improved certain aspects of the business. Asking the following questions can be essential when establishing baseline metrics:
- How many visitors are coming from search engines? What pages are they visiting most frequently? Which search engines are they coming from?
- What keywords is your website ranking for? Are there terms that you should target via link building that have more search volume?
- How many conversions and leads is the website producing?
- How many pages does a visitor usually click through when visiting the website?
- What is the total number of pages that are currently indexed by search engines?
Track URL Changes To Pages
You need to keep track of whether any of your URLs have changed. This can happen when you go from HTML pages to using a CMS like that of WordPress. Updating URLs and deleting duplicate pages is important as you do not want to be penalized for duplicate content. Removing content from the old website or changing it is important even if it is just rewritten without new information being offered.
Strangers And Friends Testing The Website
A new website should always be tested thoroughly before it is officially launched to all customers. Strangers will not have blinders on like someone that was involved in the development and design of the website. You should ask the following questions of those that are testing your website:
- What do you think the main goal of the website is? If this is unclear, how can this be improved? If there is a checkout process, how easy and secure does it seem?
- Does the content on the website add value or information that you seek? Is the content easy to read and does it help answer your questions?
- Does the website work well on mobile devices? What browsers have you tested the website on? Different browsers could notify a business of problems as small errors can make a huge difference.
Keep SEO in Mind
You are going to have to do keyword research in order to optimize the title tags and meta descriptions of each page. These keywords and descriptions make it easy for search engines to figure out the goal of a page. Header tags are also going to be important when it comes to making content easy to navigate. Online sellers will need professionals in Ecommerce SEO to maximize conversions.
Building backlinks to the new pages is important and can be done through outreach. Most publishers are willing to fix a broken link if your pages have changed. Some will just remove the link totally so potentially send them a new piece of content to entice them to publish another link.
Launching the New Website
Below are the things you need to do when you do relaunch your website:
- Make sure you take care of your 301 redirects.
- Update your pages in Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
- Check your website manually and see if the correct pages are directing to the right location on search results.
- Check your page speed and loading times. You need to make sure these are reasonable as it could hurt your rankings. Use Google PageSpeed Insights or another tool to see if page speed is an issue with your website.
Conclusion
The relaunching of a website should not be something that you are afraid of doing. You can maintain rankings and consistently improve the amount of business the company website brings in. You won’t lose all of the hard work that you have done if you relaunch with care. The continuation of monitoring key metrics that define website success is important. You might be able to notice patterns in traffic by the month or even as the day goes. This can be important when it comes time to publish content to get the most eyes on it.
