Website Redesign SEO Audit Factors to Check
With Free SEO Pre & Post Launch Checklist
It’s time to update your website with a fresh new look. Your SEO is still brining in plenty of traffic, but you’re worried what redesigning the site may do to your rankings. We’ve all been there, and there is a way to make sure all of your rankings stay safe.
In this article, I will show you 13 step process that will protect your search engine rankings so that you do not lose any traffic at all. If you follow this process, you should see no dip in traffic, no matter what your website design agency tells you.
The truth of the matter is, most website design agencies will sadly not admit that they don’t have the technical SEO support to protect your rankings so they will try to set the expectations with you by telling you that you should expect a dip in traffic at first. This is not true if you know what you are doing.
Prior to redesigning a website, you should perform a SEO audit assessing the following factors:
- Information Architecture – You should have the current website’s information architecture mapped out by page level.
Offsite SEO Factors
- Backlink Analysis – Run a link analysis on every page.
- Losing links on a website redesign is one of top reasons for losing rank. In some cases, you may have useful resources that have acquired many links over time. In this particular case, you should either leave everything content related on that page the same, or make sure that it’s better than before.
- If you decide to update your resources, make sure you understand why people are linking to them. If someone links to a page it’s because it provides some sort of value to their users. Make sure, if you change the content, that it continues to provide that value.
- Most backlink analysis tools will provide you with the anchor text of your pages’ inbound links. Make a list by page so you know which offsite relevancy factors are influencing your rank.
On Page SEO Factors
It’s important to pay very close attention to on page seo factors while performing a website redesign seo audit. There are many factors to evaluate and they can be easy to miss.
- Title tag and meta description structure.
- Robots.txt file configurations
- Content assets, including PDFs, Videos, and Images.
- Interlinking structure and anchor text used on each page.
- Current page load times of each page.
- Navigation structure
- Internal page secondary navigations
- Schema markup or microdata
- Page word count
- Canonical links, pagination, and cross domain canonicalization
- Semantic structure of the website (H1, H2, H3, paragraphs, anchor text, semantic relevancy)
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