TRAFFIC
WEBSITE REDESIGN: 5 SEO CHECKS TO
SAVE AND INCREASE YOUR TRAFFIC
Are you planning to change the design of your website or its underlying platform? Here Matteo Monari of
BizUp provides his expert guide to getting the right strategy and checks in place to protect against losing
traffic in the process.
WITH MORE AND more users switching
from desktop to mobile devices as their
favourite way to access the Web and mobile
searches1 surpassing desktop searches,
many websites still stuck in the desktop-only
world are rushing towards mobile-friendly possibly even mobile-first - redesigns. Most
changes in the design (i.e. front-end) of a
website are potentially critical in terms of
SEO, and if we consider the fact that very
often redesigning a website also means
re-platforming it (e.g. changing its backend and URL structure as well) we can
easily understand why any action of this
kind entails several SEO risks. Long-term
benefits following a good redesign are often
significant, but in the short and middle-term,
even small mistakes in the redesign and
migration processes can lead to significant
traffic loss. To help you limit these risks
and improve the SEO benefits of a website
redesign, here are 5 SEO safety checks you
should always perform before launching a
new design.
1. Identify your most important
pages and sections
Websites can have hundreds, thousands and
even millions of pages, but most of the time
the value of their content follows a typical
80-20 distribution rule, in which 20% of
the pages are responsible for 80% of their
traffic and revenue. More precisely though,
the most important pages of your website
are not only those with the highest amount
of traffic, but those with the highest value.
This can be assessed in number of different
ways – traffic, but also rankings, persuasion,
conversions and links.
Before launching your newly designed
website - possibly even before starting to
develop it - you should make sure to know
Figure 1: Majestic analysis of most linked-to pages
what the most important pages of your
site are, not only in terms of traffic and
conversion (i.e. sign-ups and leads) but also
in terms of rankings, links and SEO value.
Here are four questions you can ask yourself
to identify such pages:
1. W
hich pages are the most popular
landing pages for SEO traffic?
2. W
hich pages are key steps in the
conversion funnel?
3. W
hich pages drive most conversions?
4. W
hich pages have received the most links
in the past?
Ahead of starting your redesign you
should answer these questions and make
clear lists of your top pages. As a matter
of fact, in your redesign you will want
to pay special attention to their layout,
hierarchy and migration, in order not
to lose their precious traffic, persuasive
power, conversions and SEO value. From
a technical point of view, questions 1 to 3
can be answered by your analytics software,
while for question 4 you can use SEO tools
like Majestic2 or Moz3, which can provide
http://searchengineland.com/its-official-google-says-more-searches-now-on-mobile-than-on-desktop-220369
http://www.majestic.com
http://www.moz.com
4
https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.it/2015/10/deprecating-our-ajax-crawling-scheme.html
you with lists of your site’s most linked-to
and “powerful” pages (See Figure 1).
2. Make sure your new design has
no obvious SEO pitfalls
If you are changing your old website for
a new one, it goes without saying that the
latter should satisfy all basic requirements in
terms of SEO. As a quick checklist, here is a
non-exhaustive list of macroscopic mistakes
you may make when redesigning your site:
Moving content to login-protected
areas. As search engine spiders are not
registered users, it would be impossible for
them to access any area of your site that
requires a username or password in order
for users to access it. Therefore, you should
consider replicating any “hidden” piece
of fundamental information in a publicly
accessible area of the site.
Generating key areas of content
using AJAX and JavaScript. Despite
recent advances in crawling and indexing
JavaScript-based content4, HTML-based
content remains a safer and easier-to-
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