How to Redesign Your Construction Website Without Affecting SEO

Update your Site Without Affecting SEO
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Learn How to Redesign Your Site Without Negatively Affecting Your SEO Rankings

We have been taught from the time we were kids that judging someone by their appearance is bad. But in the world of marketing, your prospects and customers will judge your site by its appearance. This means that you will need to update your site regularly. Contrary to somewhat popular belief, search engine optimization (SEO) is not done only once. You will need to update your SEO content now and then. To avoid letting the hard work that you put into SEO going to waste, you should know how to redesign your site without affecting SEO. Because designing a new website from scratch requires a lot of time, money and effort.

Know more: Benefits of Content Marketing for Every Construction Company

Why you Should Consider SEO In A Redesign

It takes months and sometimes even years to see positive results from SEO. This is because your competitors are also working on SEO for their own business. With all of the hard work that goes into doing SEO, you probably don’t want to lose these valuable assets. So, you want to preserve pages that are performing well and forget about the pages that aren’t. 

Of course, if your pages don’t rank very well in SERPs to begin with, then you needn’t worry about how a redesign will affect your SEO. 

How to Redesign A Website Without Affecting SEO

If you already have a good organic traffic standing, then you should know how to proceed with redesigning your site without losing your rank. Below is a step-by-step process on how to redesign without affecting SEO.

Step 1: Consider your SEO rankings

Before you proceed forward with a redesign, you need to analyze your current SEO standings. If you have an old, outdated, and buggy site, you should definitely redesign your site. If your site is currently not ranking very high in organic rankings, then you won’t really miss itBut if you have a good SEO rank, you should definitely rethink doing a redesign. To check your current rank, use analytics, and look at which keywords are bringing you good traffic. Make a note of these keywords and your metadata. 

Step 2Crawl your existing website

With your list of keywords and metadata in place, now you should analyze your current link structure. You can do this by crawling your entire site. When you redesign your site, you will end up changing the URL structure. There are various plugins (like Yoast SEO) that can help you do thisThis SEO crawl will help you understand your current website structure, and if your existing site is doing well, you want to keep the architecture of your site intact. If not, you can skip this step. 

Step 3: Keep your old (current) site live

Keep your site live until you are ready to launch the redesigned websiteBecause it is important to prevent any loss of information or interruptions. It will also prevent you from losing website visits if prospects or customers want to check out your offerings. Once you are done with redesigning your site, you can move everything to your current site. And when you go live, you will need to empty the cache if there is one. You can remove any files relating to your old site after the new one starts running.

Step 4Redesign on a temporary URL

Never, we repeat, NEVER start redesigning on your existing website. It can cause all sorts of issues that even your visitors may experience. You may also end up creating long-term issues that will take a lot of time to resolve. Now you don’t want Google to index this site if you have good content. Otherwise, when you launch your new site, it will become a duplicate. So, ensure that your developer does this as quickly as possible.

Read more: What Unique Content You Need on your Construction Website?

Step 5Create 301 redirects

As discussed earlier, you should preserve as much of your original site architecture as you can. If specific pages are performing well for specific keywords, you want to keep as much of the original content as possible. If you change any of the URLs on your pages, though, you want to make sure that you set up 301 redirects between old and new URLs. This will ensure that your SEO work stays intact and that all of your valuable backlinks are preserved. If done correctly, search engines will see a 404 Page Not Found error.

Step 6: Test your website

After copying your existing website into your new website, you will need to test it before you launch. Check for broken links and ensure that all features are working. Check all content, images, and forms to ensure that they are working correctly. Ensure that the site loads quickly and that it is mobile-friendly as well since many people tend to surf the internet from mobile devices. All URLs should be working and not lead a user to the wrong page or a broken link. Ensure that every possible journey in your site leads to where it is supposed to. 

These are the steps you want to follow if you are going to redesign your site without affecting SEO. If you are planning to do this on your own, it may not be a great idea. To avoid irreversible or expensive corrections later, you should hire a professional who knows how to do website development for construction companies. Keep an eye on your site for a while after to ensure that everything is functioning correctly. 

The expert team of designers at CMGurus knows how to do responsive web design for construction companies. We also offer SEO guidance for any construction company, big or small. If you are looking to preserve your SEO rankings and want to also do website development for your construction company, without losing them, please reach out to us.