When your site feels too outdated, when it lacks mobile friendliness, when you are not getting the traffic results you want, or when it doesn’t align with your business or brand any longer – these all are the signs that you might need website rebranding.
Rebranding your site can be a very overwhelming and daunting endeavor. Yet, it’s often a necessity rather than an option when you strive to stay competitive and relevant in today’s digital landscape. So, no matter how challenging it can be, it’s an investment in your future success.
Among all the challenges associated with this undertaking, there’s one that seems the most pressing – the potential loss of SEO and organic traffic that you’ve built over the years through persistence and effort. To redesign a website without losing SEO, you must preserve existing SEO elements and optimize them for better results. This can be tough. However, we created a comprehensive roadmap to help you achieve the desired results. Read on to find actionable tips from the industry’s experts.
Pre-Rebrand SEO Analysis
Before you can apply any changes, you need a clear idea of where you are standing right now in terms of SEO. To gain this understanding, you must conduct an in-depth audit of your existing pages.
The critical goals of the pre-redesign audit are to:
- Understand your current traffic and rankings;
- Understand how your site’s architecture is currently set up;
- Determine what content, links, and other elements underperform and which bring the best results at this moment;
- Benchmark the primary SEO KPIs that you want to retain after rebranding.
Auditing your pages manually can be rather challenging. Luckily, there are specialized tools like SEO checkers and audit software that will help. Check out Top10seosoftware.com to discover collections of tools for this purpose. Top 10 is an unbiased online portal designed to help users find the best search engine optimization software for their needs. So, it should help you find the right audit tool.
When running an audit with the help of special software, be sure to assess your current website’s performance, keywords, and rankings. Additionally, focus on your most high-performing content and backlinks. Your content and links are among the most valuable assets for your SEO. So, if you find elements that perform great in terms of driving traffic, make sure to preserve them on your redesigned pages.
Set Clear Rebranding Goals
When you rebrand a website, you can improve its visual appeal, mobile friendliness, quality of content and links, and other indicators that create value for your visitors. As a result, you can enhance the overall user experience and your SEO, too. However, success requires a lot of planning, and wise preparation should begin with defining clear goals.
When you change anything on your pages without specific objectives in mind, you risk losing the performance you currently have and harming your brand in the future. Thus, this process always needs goals.
That’s when auditing plays a considerable role. By assessing your current performance, you should be able to tell where you still have gaps and what can be improved to boost user experience – and this should be your goal.
For example, if during the audit you notice that your pages are running slowly, you must know that this significantly affects your SEO. According to recent stats, nearly 1 in 2 visitors (45%) abandon a website that takes 6 or more seconds to load. So, if this issue is revealed during the audit, then site speed optimization should be one of your primary redesign goals.
Other common goals include:
- Breaking into new markets;
- Ensuring brand equity;
- Improving mobile-friendliness;
- Lowering bounce rate;
- Enhancing traffic, etc.
Be sure to identify measurable and specific goals to make the process seamless and effective.
Preserve Existing SEO Elements
Often, when implementing website rebranding, site owners want to craft brand-new content that aligns with their vision and brand identity. This is easy to understand. However, remember that people (and search engines alike) prefer content they are already familiar with. Thus, when you change everything, you risk losing your authority and SEO value. And they can take plenty of time to gain back.
To avoid this, you need to leverage audit and identify top-performing elements that bring you the most traffic and retain them. Namely, be sure to keep well-performing URLs, meta tags, high-volume keywords, content, and other valuable SEO elements. On pages where you want to change content, combine the old and new content for the best results. This will help you stay authoritative and, at the same time, help with your redirects.
301 redirects are permanent redirects that take users from the old URL to a new one whenever they request an old one. These redirects are crucial for rebranding as they help users find your new site easily.
You can implement 301 redirects with the help of your .htaccess files:
- Go to the root directory of your site and use your hosting control panel or FTP to access your .htaccess files.
- Back up your files before applying any changes.
- Edit .htaccess files. Redirects should look similar to this:
Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.yourdomain.com/newpage.html
- Save new files with redirects and upload them to your server.
- Test how your redirects work by accessing your old URL.
Maintain High-Quality Content
Once you deal with redirects, focus on your content. As was mentioned earlier, the best strategy for effective SEO for website redesign is to combine your old and new content. So, let’s discuss how to do this in practice.
When optimizing your old content, focus on making it fresh and relevant. Most importantly, ensure it reflects the changes to your business and vision. Also, look for opportunities for SEO improvement. For example, optimize your inbound links, insert new, more relevant keywords, etc.
When crafting brand-new content, do some planning first:
- Identify your new brand image and core values;
- Create specific brand guidelines;
- Identify your new content goals.
After you take these steps, focus on crafting high-value, original content that will resonate with your audience. And don’t forget about working search engine optimization tricks to ensure high rankings – use relevant and high-performing keywords, adhere to logical structure, etc.
Monitor and Test During the Transition
User experience is one of the most crucial things for your rankings. Thus, when you want to redesign a website without losing SEO, you want to ensure that the user experience on your new URL is good and even better than on the old one.
When adjusting content, site structure, design, and other parts of your site, the best way to ensure excellent UX is to perform A/B testing. In a nutshell, this test allows you to take two or more versions of a specific element (e.g., a landing page, button, etc.) and test which version performs better.
Such an approach to redesign can help you make more data-driven decisions, reduce the guesswork, and enhance user experience.
There are two tools that can help you monitor the performance and test new pages while you make the transition – Google Analytics and Search Console.
Google Analytics is a tool that helps you analyze different aspects of your site’s performance. With its help, you can seamlessly run your tests. In your dashboard, go to Reporting → All Experiments → Create an Experiment. Then, pick the A/B Test as the preferred type of experiment, specify the pages you want to compare, and receive a complete overview of their performance to choose the best-performing option.
Search Console is used for a different purpose. This platform spans a variety of tools and reports designed to help you track and assess the performance of your site in search, as well as the traffic it receives. Use it to analyze how well your new pages perform in search results to find areas for improvement and boost your rankings.
Implement Proper Site Structure
When you move on to adjusting your site structure, the general rule of thumb is to stick to the same architecture as used on your old URL. This approach works best as long as your old site is well-organized. In this case, retaining the same structure will help you maintain familiar navigation and set up 301 redirects more seamlessly, matching the same pages to each other.
If you need to adjust your architecture, focus on the following tips:
- Create a consistent and easy-to-understand layout;
- Incorporate clear visual hierarchy;
- Provide convenient navigation elements to help users browse through your site without effort;
- Incorporate internal links to let users hop from one relevant page to another easily.
Most importantly, focus on responsiveness and user-friendliness to make your site genuinely intuitive.
Update and Verify Your Sitemap and Robots.txt
Once you optimize your domain, structure, and other changes, you should notify search engines about this to help them link your new URL to the old one. To do this, create and verify your new sitemap and submit it via Google Search Console as a sitemap.xml file.
Also, remember to update your robots.txt files. These files let search engines crawl and index your pages correctly. Thus, by editing them, you will help crawling bots understand what to check.
Outreach and Link Reclamation
Chances are that your old website had some backlinks that created your brand authority and generated traffic. Needless to say, backlinks are crucial for your SEO, and thus, you want to retain them after website rebranding. That’s when you need to perform backlink outreach,
The goal of this process is to get all your top-performing links to direct users to a new URL instead of an old one. To do this, you need to audit your site and identify your most vital links, as well as the sites that link back to you.
Then, note down all your backlinks in a single database to eliminate duplicates and have a directory for your link outreach. Finally, reach out to the sites from your list via email and ask them to update the links. Ideally, use a personalized approach instead of a general template to get the best results from your outreach efforts.
Remember to follow up with everyone you reach out to and note down all replies and updates that were successfully made to keep track of the progress.
Post-Rebrand SEO Audit
Finally, the last tip for successful SEO for website redesign is to perform a post-rebrand audit. During the next few months, after updating your site, monitor its performance to ensure that everything functions properly.
Most importantly, you want to focus on the following things:
- Directory listings;
- Links;
- 404s;
- Crawl errors;
- Traffic;
- Rankings.
Keeping track of these and other crucial performance elements will help you ensure that your redesigned pages work as expected and detect any issues that might be there. So pay attention to this step.
Final Thoughts
Website rebranding can be a necessity that you can’t avoid when you need to align your site with the vision of your brand. It might be time-consuming and challenging. However, it offers plenty of opportunities to enhance your pages’ performance and gain even more traffic than before. However, you need to approach it the right way to get the best outcomes.
Effective redesign requires thorough planning, identifying specific goals, preserving top-performing content and SEO elements, and continuous monitoring of the results. Now that you have this guide at hand, you know about the specific steps you need to take to redesign your website without losing SEO and traffic. Use the steps and tips from this article to make this process simple and intuitive and to acquire the best outcomes after you finish.