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.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a treasure trove of SEO information and will give you the straight dope on your rankings and traffic.
Here, you’ll see high-opportunity keywords and pages with lots of impressions but not many clicks.
Visit Search Console
Performance > Search Results
The main information you are looking for is in the queries and pages tabs. You can order this by clicks (traffic) and impressions (which is an opportunity).
Work through this information and document your findings in the template.
Crawl data
Crawl your website and save a copy of the crawl (Screaming Frog is a cost-effective or free way of doing this under 500 pages).
This will allow you to check links to the page and compare with the new site if (and when) problems arise.
SEO tools
You can also use any SEO tools for rank tracking.
Still, I prefer Search Console and Google Analytics for this as they give you real data and insight, not the extrapolated data the typical SEO tools provide, which can often be wildly inaccurate and misleading.
Dig deeper: Website redesign SEO checklist: Retaining and improving SEO
2. SEO and website goals
Goals are crucial to any project. Starting with clear goals helps you understand your destination, making it easier to find the right path forward.
Goals provide you with a tool for assessing all decisions throughout the project.
Will doing something help us hit our goals? If not, don’t do it. If so, go for it!
You may have goals for the website project overall, ideally these will be hierarchical. For instance, we may have one super goal that states the goal of the new website is to generate more leads.
You may then have sub-goals such as to improve SEO and improve conversion rates that work in service of the master goal.
Remember to make your SEO goals specific and measurable, so SMART goals are helpful here.
Overall, you may need a hierarchy of goals here that covers:
Website Goal: Generate more leads/sales.
SEO Goal 1: Rank our service pages more highly.
SEO Goal 2: Rank our upper funnel marketing content highly.
You may also find it useful to look at things you want to avoid with the new site. Determining what you are aiming at and what you are running away from can be just as helpful, if not more so.
Anti-goal: Avoid having a site that is essentially no different from our competitors.
Document your goals in the website plan template and move on.
3. Audience and customer segments
Carefully define your target audience(s) along with some considerations regarding your competitors.
Remember, in marketing, targeting everyone is targeting no one.
That is not to say you can’t target multiple audiences, but you do need to give some consideration to each audience and factor this into the structure and segmentation of your new site.
We want to carefully consider the goals, problems and jobs of our target audience to ensure our business goals, website goals and the goals of the people we serve are all finely aligned.