New Re-design will my website rankings drop?

[edward-may]

Hi guys,

I have had to re-design my site although we are only 4 months into the seo game we have seen some good progress with our rankings. My question is there anything I need to consider before implementing the new designs so it doesn't effect my current rankings or any of our SEO work.

Our current designs are content thing and so we have had to create more content to better optimize our site, however if doing so will this loose our current ranking position?

Apperciate any advice around this

Thanks

[ofw12387]

If you do a good job, you will not lose any ranking.

You should:

• Check that all the meta tags / canonicals / titles reminds as before

• Be sure that the url structure reminds exactly as before

I would recommend you not go process the modification directly in production. Use a dummy server for it and check with Screaming FROG that everything is ok. And then, when you are sure everything looks ok, go to production

[ShivJaiswal]

Please make sure the URL structure remains same in new website, as SEO majorly depends upon permalinks(URLs).

[DirkC]

If it's just design that changes it will normally have no negative impact on your site - if you do a good job it could even improve your rankings if user experience improves (increase time/visit, time/page & lower bounce rate)

If it has impact on your site structure I would do as ofw12387 : deploy a test site & use Screaming Frog to do a full audit:

• crawl your current site - export everything to xls
• crawl the new version of the site - based on the url's of the first crawl to check if everything is properly redirected
  Export the results and compare with the original results in xls.
• Do a final crawl on the new site (spider mode) - to see that all url's are accessible & that the site structure didn't change (pushing content deeper in the site)

If you have traffic on image search - also check that the position & the names of the images are not changing.

Good luck with the redesign,

Dirk

[DonnaDuncan]

I like this how to retain at least 95% of your organic traffic guide from quick sprout. Very helpful. b-s.ee/1pvTWfc

[EGOL]

In my opinion... "How can I preserve my rankings during a site redesign?" is the wrong question.

It is the question asked by fearful people instead of by the person who is motivated to win.

If you are going to put the work of a redesign into your website, you should do the job right, do a careful evaluation and determine how the optimization, structure, SEO performance and conversion rate can be improved.

Use this as a time to study, get qualified assistance and make some clear gains.

When will you have time and the money to do these things properly again?

If you go into this and the SEO is fixated on avoiding loss, says nothing of opportunities and how you are going to kick things up a notch then you are wasting your time and have hired the wrong person.

[edward-may]

Hi EGOL

Thanks for your feedback.  Yes there is an element of fear in there, I'm new to SEO so still trying to get my head around it all, hence why I'm here getting the assistance required to take these next steps.  I have already re-designed the site, now it is ready to implement so I'm looking to see what needs to be considered before implementing the designs from an SEO point.

[edward-may]

Thank you Donna, will check it out

[edward-may]

Thanks so much for your help Dirk, Great idea, I'll definitely look into that.

[edward-may]

Great thanks so much! Looks like a test dummy and screaming frog is the answer

[edward-may]

Thanks Shiv, much appreciate the feedback

[EGOL]

I do that too.  When I do a redesign, I always hire someone who knows more about SEO than I to do a site assessment and look for opportunities.  It is well worth the cost.  In fact it can bring payback of many times what you pay.

I do have some fear in this process too, but getting the good advice and doing things very carefully reduces that to a low level.

[edward-may]

I had a couple of people who worked on our SEO a few times but we never really got much good advice.  The best advice I have had so far comes from MOZ and our most recent SEO guy, and people such as yourself.  Asking these questions on moz helps reduce it.