Involve SEO in your redesign! It’s essential for site migrations and even if you change an existing page. Here are the top 5 considerations that can be overlooked:
- Permanent (301) redirections that map old to new URLs. Make as many inline links as possible direct and without redirect chains. Furthermore, it’s a good idea to crawl the old site to facilitate this while baselining other data.
- Assurance that noindex tags, improper canonicals and other technical issues don’t harm organic traffic.
- Any content updates will affect keyword rankings. Header tags, though requiring compromise across branding, product & SEO, do matter. This also includes less conspicuous on-page SEO elements like titles & meta descriptions, image attributes & schema. Body text should remain specific enough for important phrases, and decreasing word count is risky.
- Internal linking to hub pages, with relevant anchor text (not just LEARN MORE), ideally added via HTML and not JS. As popular today, clickable sections won’t have keyword-rich anchor text by default. This includes site architecture, like increasing click depth due to nav menu changes.
- While not specialized in UX, SEOs will recommend usability improvements like breadcrumbs & tables of contents that improve search results too. This also means balancing speed with creative assets.
Taking these steps will limit both the short-term & long-term organic traffic decrease, instead allowing you to reap the full benefits of your changes!