“We get 4 or more client inquiries every month from companies whose site redesign has significantly hurt their SEO.”
You’ve spent a lot of time. You’ve spent a lot of money. You role out your beautiful, sexy, fantastic new website to rave reviews — only to have organic search traffic tank. You would be surprised how often we hear this story. We get 4 or more client inquiries every month from companies whose site redesign has significantly hurt their SEO.
Why does this happen? The answer is simple. Many web designers and programmers have little to no SEO expertise. In pursuit of beautiful presentation and elegant functionality they make design and programming decisions that can actually hurt you badly in organic search results. In addition, other parts of the process are often overlooked – such as putting in place 301 redirects – which can further exacerbate the problems.
Don’t let this happen to you! Make sure you have SEO experts at the table before you start the process of redesigning your website.
That’s where PPJ Consulting comes in. Our Website Redesign SEO services can prevent this from happening to you. In addition, if this has already happened to you, we’ll help you fix it fast!
Website Redesign SEO Process
Ideally, there are three phases to our Website Redesign SEO Service: Phase one happens prior to implementing any changes and preferably prior to major design and development work. Phase 2 is during design and development. Phase 3 is after the new site goes live.
Phase 1 – Prior to Implementing a New Site
There are several steps to this phase to set the stage for the redesign and implementation of the new site. These include:
- Crawling the site prior to the implementation of any changes.
- Performing a manual review of the site prior to any changes.
- Building a list of key landing pages for the site. This will be used to make sure that the site redesign continues to place proper emphasis on those pages. It is also used as input into the 301 redirect map that will need to be created for all pages on the old site.
Phase 2 – Design and Development
In this phase PPJ Consulting will act as a sounding board to the design and development team providing critical SEO advice as they go through the process of creating the new site. Some key steps in this phase include:
- Reviewing the choice of publishing systems (CMS, e-commerce platform, and/or development environment) to ensure that they are SEO friendly, and, if necessary, explain how to configure the new publishing system to get the best SEO value.
- Reviewing the planned navigation hierarchy and site design and providing advice on how to preserve the greatest amount of SEO value of the current site possible.
- Reviewing any wire-frames or mock-ups of the new site.
- Building a 301 redirect map that accounts for any changes of URLs during the process.
- Crawling the new site as soon as it is available on a staging server, or if that is not possible, just as soon as it goes live (doing this on a staging server is highly preferred).
Phase 3 – Launch Phase
As critical as the other phases are, this phase is were PPJ Consulting will verify that everything is working as planned from an SEO standpoint. Key steps in this phase include:
- Re-crawling the site to look for any unforeseen problems.
- Reviewing Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools data also looking for unforeseen problems.
- Verifying that 301 redirects are working properly.
Redesigning and launching a new website should be a positive event. With PPJ Consulting by your side during the redesign effort you can rest assured that your new website will exceed expectations and that the experience will be one of launching a beautiful, sexy, fantastic new website to rave reviews AND growing organic search traffic!