That’s right, a certain decorum is required when approaching website redesign projects.
Any self-employed amateur can redesign a website. It may even look good to the untrained eye. But it takes a multi-disciplinary team of copywriters, web development, and online marketing professionals to ensure that your shiny new website doesn’t leave behind your existing visitor traffic and the authority you’ve worked so hard to build up with search engines over several years.
When redesigning a website, a qualified vendor will…
- Look for domain forwarding, domain mirroring, or other domain hosting or registration deployments that may be confusing search engines and preventing your website from receiving credit for all of its content.
- Conduct exhaustive homework upfront to become intimately familiar with your website, its current rankings and indexed pages in order to leverage and extend existing strengths. Uncovering which keywords are driving traffic to which pages of your website is a key piece of information that should be determined before any re-development is carried out.
- Build a sitemap of the old website to ensure that pages and functionalities that are tucked away from obvious places such as the primary navigation aren’t left behind in the new versions of the website.
- In cases of domain migration, study current server capabilities and ensure required scripts and functionalities will continue to work on destination servers.
- Respect the existing website structure and redirect pages that will be removed in a search engine friendly manner.
- Build an SEO profile for your website in order to retain as much domain authority as possible.
Too often redesigning a website becomes such a superficial exercise in improving appearances while maintaining keyword rankings, existing traffic, and domain authority is simply an afterthought. From the perspective of functionality and driving ROI, web development vendors should approach your redesign project more like a brain surgeon and less like a demolition crew.
Ali Kouros
Ali Kouros is co-founder of MetaMed Marketing. Ali heads up operations, engineering, productions, and practice marketing for MetaMed.
