Many redesigned websites fail to improve SEO, often damaging existing rankings and creating challenges for SEO teams trying to recover lost traffic. This can severely affect business visibility, lead generation and sales.
I have been handed many a brand new website and asked to “SEO it” when untold damage has been done and significant time and effort must be spent just to get traffic levels back where they were before the redesign.
Many articles help with website SEO and how to retain SEO traffic during a redesign. There are also helpful books and frameworks for website planning.
Yet, seemingly no resource combines a sensible approach to planning a new site with the retention and improvement of SEO.
This article will outline how to plan a new website effectively to retain existing traffic and create a platform to improve your SEO.
To make following along easier, you can fill out the steps in the template below:
Website planning and SEO
To ensure your new website retains and improves your SEO, it is helpful to ensure you have a clearly defined SEO strategy and you have articulated this in a simple SEO plan.
The worst thing in any website design project is when unexpected problems or changes arrive during development.
A well-developed plan that has input from all stakeholders helps ensure less of this. More importantly, if the customer changes their mind or the scope creeps (the scope always creeps), you have the document to show the original scope and justify the necessary fee increases.
I wish I had a dollar for every time we were asked to review a new site that was almost finished – only to find that SEO hadn’t been considered, putting its success at risk.
We recently worked on a six-figure project for a business that thrived on organic traffic. The project would essentially destroy all the hard-earned SEO.
This took several months and probably another six figures in PPC spend (to replace what was free SEO traffic from an SEO vs. PPC perspective), as well as further SEO time and redevelopment. You want to avoid that if at all possible.
We have also seen other sites that had so comprehensively damaged SEO traffic that the only sensible approach was to roll back to the previous site.
Suffice it to say that ensuring you retain SEO traffic and set the scene for improvements is not something you can leave to chance.
The approach laid out here combines a fairly standard approach to website planning, which, done well, will save much time, money and pain, with the kind of jobs needed to retain existing SEO traffic while building a furtive platform for further SEO development.
The output of this process should be a document that either acts as the foundation of the website brief or is integrated into a traditional brief.
Note: Where the SEO brief and website brief are separate entities, I always recommend reviewing the final website brief to ensure the SEO brief has been incorporated before the project kicks off.
There are five key steps to work through to create your SEO-friendly website blueprint:
1. Existing rankings and traffic
Your must understand your traffic and where it comes from.
To do this, spend some time in Google Analytics and Google Search Console to identify:
- High-ranking keywords.
- High-traffic keywords.
- High-traffic content.
- High-opportunity pages.
- High-opportunity keywords.
Your goal is to clearly document what works currently. These must be included in the new site.
If high-traffic content is removed, not correctly optimized, or lost in the new site’s hierarchy, then you are inviting problems.
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