When it comes to refreshing your site and revamp the content, a very reasonable question arises. How the site changes will affect your SEO performance? Will the current ranking go down? This infographic illustrates the ultimate SEO checklist for a website redesign. You should know that if executed not properly, all your SEO efforts might drain down. On the other hand, there is an opportunity to improve your website traffic significantly. So, the infographic showcases all important steps related to the redesign process.
First, when speaking for pre-design always consider new site structure and URLs as well as 301 redirect map. What is more, do not forget to re-define and create keywords strategy. Second, during the redesign process it is vital to block Googlebot. This will prevent your site from crawling in the meantime. In the same time, you should improve the site speed and use unique meta tagging. Doing this, your SEO rankings are very likely to skyrocket. These days Google encourages mobile friendly sites so do not forget to use a responsive theme. Furthermore, before the site launch it is crucial to install new or existing Google Analytics. This will help you to track and analyze your audience. Besides, consider sitemap creation and 404-page creation. Visitors do like custom 404 pages so you should create a catchy 404 page related to your brand. At this time, you should unblock Googlebot in order Google bots to crawl your revamped sites.
Finally, there are some important post-lunch steps as well. For example, check the number of new pages indexed and create an annotation in Google Analytics. Consequently, adjust goals in Google Analytics. Try to monitor Google Search Console Errors to prevent any problems. So, all these steps are required to be sure that your website redesign will not harm your current SEO rankings.
Source: http://digitrio.com.sg/seo/