Preserving Website Rankings In A Few Easy Steps

by Fanboy SEO · Published October 29, 2019 · Updated November 22, 2019

It is not a very difficult task to preserve your site ranking if you are thinking about a website redesign. You must, for that reason, focus more on the SEO aspect. This should be your top concern as this will be the all-inclusive process that will do several things such as:

Help you in preservation of your organic rankings
Help you in conservation of link popularity and
Help you in recycling the old page content.

This will in short help you in your overall digital marketing effort helping you to make the most out of this most effective environment to promote your brand and products.

Now you may think what is the need to redesign your site in the first place knowing the fact that the search engine ranking ecosystem is highly fragile. Well, this is the very reason that you should redesign your site. This will help you to stay on top, literally, in Google or in the social media platforms that will grow stronger and stronger over the years.

However, to make a proper impression in this fragile ecosystem of your search engine rankings, there are a few specific things that you need to know when you go for website redesign, especially with SEO sustainability in your mind. Read on to know exactly which step should you take to preserve rankings.

Review the landscape

Surveying the landscape that you wi9sh to work on is every important and there are two specific things that you should look for when you review the platform.

The first step to ensure that you have a better and proper redesign is that you must make sure that you know the exact phrases that you are looking for your ranking.
You should also know the specific pages that are ranking well in the result pages of the search engines.

These keyword phrases as well as their rank will typically be the benchmark for you. These will help you to measure the health of your new site when you use them. Also make sue that you use the Google Analytics precisely to find out and list those particular pages that are gaining more organic traffic from the search engines.

These steps will ensure that your newly designed site gets a new home and a better rank in the new environment.

Reduce the changes made

You must reduce the number of changes made when you redesign your site. You can do this best by reusing the URLs and not making any drastic changes to your site. This includes changing your domain. There are several reasons to say so such as:

This will be a shock to the system
It may even result in an entire SEO collapse.

However, you can reduce these chances by reusing the URLs o the most important pages. This will radically diminish the footprint of the changes made in your site and at the same time reduce the impact on your SEO and to your site rankings.

Recycle page content

You must sort out the contents that are reusable just like you sort out plastic and paper from the trash. This will help you to use them in your current site more easily. Therefore, focus on:

Recycling the good things that you can reuse
Following the SEO best practices
Adding keyword phrases in your title tags
Using header tags
Adding internal links that are working well currently.

All others such as duplicate content, low quality pages, bad marketing copy, and low-traffic content should be considered as ‘garbage’ and tossed.

Biodiversity of key phrase

You will them need to make sure that you have a diverse range of pages. This should include the following:

A specific page for each keyword phrase that you are currently using and
A number of new pages that matches with the new keyword phrases that you have identified.

This can be best done when you create more key phrase-focused links whenever and wherever possible and relevant between all your pages. This can be uin several places such as:

In the navigation
The sitemap
The footer and even
Within the content of the page itself.

This will ensure that the redesign increases and not decreases the biodiversity of the target key phrases.

Focus on the endangered URLs

You must not allow the endangered URLs to go extinct simply because your pages have deep roots. These URLs will become more trusted by the search engines over time and will be linked to the other websites. Therefore, it is essential that you make the people and the search engines know where exactly the links will be live now that you have transplanted these pages to an entirely new environment: your new site.

As per the experts you are recommended to do the following to let others know where the links will be live now:

Create 301 redirects for all pages
Make sure all these pages are indexed and
Make sure that these pages are ranking.

This is absolutely crucial because if you do not do this, the search engines will never find them and will not rank them. This is will reduce your SEO, site traffic and prospective sales. Google will think that all those pages are now dead and you will find your site in the lower side on page number five of the SERP making it desolate and a waste of time, money and effort.

Take preventive measures

If you want to find your site at the top of page one of the search engine, you will need to take some preventative measures and follow a few SEO best practices. This you should do before you launch your newer and greener website. This will help it to thrive.

Check out the last-minute details
Update your XML sitemap
Make sure that everything in the robots.txt file is currently accurate and
Create a customized 404 error page.

All these will make sure that your new pages are found quickly and there are no chances of any breakdowns in the system, and even if there is any, the effects of it will be minimal.