If you want to stay competitive in your business, you’ll eventually need to update your website because web design trends are constantly shifting. Maintaining your domain authority and SEO rankings is crucial before, during, and throughout the process of redesigning your website. 

You must take the necessary steps to not only maintain your SEO rating but also seek ways to raise it during this time. Here are six essential tips for retaining your SEO ranking after redesigning your website.

Employ a staging site

You shouldn’t give the impression that you’re unprofessional to potential consumers. Therefore, avoid working on your redesign using the live site because you’ll probably encounter issues while focusing on the layout and informational content of the new version. Using a staging site on your WordPress hosting, a localhost server, or even a different domain ensures that no one will see your modifications while the website is being created. 

Keep in mind that closing down your old website while you redesign it can irritate new visitors. Instead, keep it up and running throughout this time. A typical strategy is to redesign it and post it at another URL. In order to prevent search engines from unintentionally presenting it in place of the official website, noindex it. Finally, finish the redesign on that distinct domain.

Keep track of SEO

There are numerous search engine monitoring tools online that can monitor crucial metrics for your website, such as keyword ranks, historical keyword data, organic traffic, domain authority, spam score, backlinks, and so on. After the introduction of the revised website, observe any changes in organic traffic. 

To determine whether the new pages are successfully attracting new viewers or not, it’s also a good idea to review page-by-page analysis. So, don’t hesitate and choose the best marketing company in Sydney that offers a variety of SEO services that have been shown to improve ranks and drive visitors.

Take into account your competition

Competitor analysis is more than just knowing what your rivals are doing. It also involves recognizing how they’re carrying it out. Researching your competition’s website structure and how they’re using links, content, and keywords to rank higher in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) is part of SEO competitor analysis. 

With the help of this investigation, we can create your unique SEO strategy based on an industry standard. Find out what’s hot in website design and development right now. To learn some useful strategies, you should research the strategies of your competition. 

Include redirects

If you manage a WordPress website, you’ll need to support redirects to maintain a compatible navigation experience as your website evolves over time. The 300 redirects that site design must take into account fall into two categories: 301 redirects which are long-lasting changes made with website visitors and search engines in mind, and temporary redirects with the 302 protocol. 

For the sake of SEO rating, you must stay away from this one when redesigning. Links and bookmarks to the old site will therefore redirect to the new one as well. Simply redirecting users to the new home page will probably annoy them, so you should try to make existing links flow to the correct page or at least a page that’s similar on the makeover.

Maintain internal linking

Between internal and external web pages, internal linking serves as a bridge. Links are a crucial component of information sharing and site navigation. Keep all current internal and external linkages intact. If you want a website that is optimized for search engines, keep internal links as much as you can. 

Furthermore, in order to get a sense of the complete page, bots pay close attention to headings and subheadings. These headings serve as a guide for Google’s spiders. Examples of headers and subheadings are H1, H2, and H6. When redesigning the website, don’t fully modify them because they’re essential for effective SEO and contain keywords.

Retain stability

Try to maintain consistency between the layout of your redesign and the original. The familiarity will prevent confusion for frequent users. Use a layout visualization tool to map out the old headers and meta description tags of your current website. 

For this, crawling technologies like Screaming Frog, and others are employed which will aid in automatic web crawling. Maintaining your website’s structure and flow is crucial if you don’t want to lose all SEO ranking.

With these essential tips, retaining your SEO rankings won’t be a problem, and you won’t miss anything as your company grows.