Far too often I see brands migrating over to a new web design or new domain name without considering their current SEO standing, and therefore completely undermining all their previous efforts which helped them become an authority figure in their industry. There is a lot of pre-planning and execution needed from an SEO perspective to ensure a website retains the keyword rankings and organic traffic you have built up in the past.
First things first, how are you going to measure the success of your redesign/rebrand if you don’t benchmark your current performance within search? I would recommend getting the following data before launching:
Average organic sessions over the past 12 months
Average organic users over the past 12 months
Average organic bounce rate over the past 12 months
Average organic order value over the past 12 months if applicable
Average organic revenue over the past 12 months if applicable
Current rankings within the top 3, 10 & 20 using SEMRush
Current search visibility score using SearchMetrics
You can then compare these figures over the coming months once launched to track performance accurately.
It is so important you have a clear structure of the new website early on. This is so you can estimate if you are going to lose any organic traffic based on any landing pages you are going to get rid of, so it is not a surprise when you relaunch.
If you are planning on removing any sections of your website on the redesign/rebrand, you can view how much traffic you could potentially lose by looking in Google Analytics.
Once you have a clear view of how the new website will look, you need to map out the old website to the new website, a clear way to do this, is to set this out in an excel spreadsheet.
Do not redirect everything to the homepage, make the redirects, as relevant as possible, this will help pass previous page rank & rankings more effectively.
Another problem that often occurs is that when a brand launches a new website, all the previous keyword optimisation on the title tags, header tags, content, alt tags and meta descriptions are removed.
Ensure you have a clear keyword mapping strategy in place when relaunching, you should know which pages you want to rank for which keywords.
Use the same GA code on your new website, as you need to compare data when launching. Instead of creating a new Google Analytics profile update the address when you launch.
I hope this has given you some tips to include when you are relaunching a website.
Courtesy of SearchEngineWatch
