A website redesign is a high-level overhaul process that involves significantly changing elements such as content, structure, code, and visual elements to increase the user experience of your website. The website redesign process entails technical aspects involving finalizing the color schemes, fonts, logo, design elements, button placement, etc. A redesigned, eye-pleasant website can tend to lower bounce rates, boost sales and revenue, and ensure a great user experience (UX). 

Suppose your Website is well-established with good traffic and rank in search engine result pages. In that case, the major challenge of redesigning a website is meeting the current algorithms, so your Website will not lose ranking or traffic. Keeping your Website updated and continuously improving the design, features, and UX, is not generally accepted by Google, but still, it is highly suggested to redesign the Website.

Why Should You Redesign Your Website?

In the internet era, a website is the only medium of representing your brand in front of prospective customers. Before purchasing any online products or services, many people check for your company's online presence and your competitors before completing the CTA action. Ultimately, reflecting a positive brand image and controlling the customer's mind are key to achieving business success. 

To help you better envision the SEO website redesign process, let's dig deeper into the most common reasons and goals why you should redesign your Website. 

    1. Rebrand your Website
    2. Updating outdated or old Websites
    3. Your Website is not responsive
    4. Not getting useful traffic, leads or sales 
    5. To improve the functionality of your Website
    6. To enhance the user experience for mobile visitors
    7. Eliminating bugs and errors
    8. Enhancing security features in your Website
    9. Adding new products or services

Illustrated by the above points, we hope you understand the importance of hiring professional website redesign services for your business. 

Top SEO Website Redesign Mistakes to Avoid

To avoid any further bustle, let's put some brightness on the most common SEO website redesign mistakes you must bypass to retain the Website's traffic and ranking on SERPs. 

1. Not Working on SEO Concept from the Starting

If you are at the initial stage of planning a website redesign, then, first of all, apply handbrake on the side running activities and focus on understanding our point.

The key matrix of long-term success in a business is getting good quality organic traffic to your Website. With good quality traffic, we mean getting a good conversion rate. You depend on paid ads for your entire life for getting your products/ services sold. 

If your SEO team gets late in the redesigning process, then there is no way of going ahead. As search engines are picky with their search results, it becomes mandatory to focus on SEO parameters.

As SEO optimizes your Website's reach for both people and search engines, it helps the target audience to find your business and services through Google, Bing, etc. This way, your prospective customers will start walking towards the path of purchasing your products or services. 

One of the biggest website redesign mistakes is that businesses fail to balance and run the Website redesigning equally and SEO practices simultaneously. If you have not built any strong SEO strategy. at the initial stage of website planning, you will lose the empire that took too much time and effort to build. 

2. Not Auditing your Current Website

A website audit examines a page's performance before large-scale search engine optimization (SEO) or a website redesign. It gives a complete insight into the Website, overall traffic, and individual web pages. 

Are you planning your website redesign? Then you must have a bird's eye view of important parameters related to your sites, such as what needs to be improved or fixed in your current website or the high results bringing areas in which you should not make any changes. 

Some of the key parameters that you can consider to audit your Website are as follows;

    • Number of visitors
    • Highest performing keywords
    • Sitemap
    • URL Structure
    • Indexed pages
    • Pages that drive more traffic and sales
    • Inbound linking domains

Whenever you are redesigning your Website, it's important to reassess the importance of each page. If you can't learn anything from the page, your viewers will not learn. 

3. Missing Responsive Design of Your Website

A well-responsive designed website allows the website content to move freely across the different screen resolutions and sizes. A responsive design makes a single website adjust to any screen resolution, and it maintains two different versions of your Website, i.e. for mobile and desktop screens. 

Your Website's rank will automatically recuperate if you provide the best experience for the user and Google. The audience loves to demand a great user experience with every device they use. To provide such a hassle-free user experience, we suggest you make a highly responsive design for your Website to make it mobile-optimized. 

When you focus on enhancing the crawler's efficiency, you are indirectly helping Google to index more of the site's content. 

4. Fails to Utilize Keywords Properly

SEO evolves every day, and now, you cannot rank your Website on top by just stuffing keywords in your content. Nowadays, if Google finds that you are blindly using or hiding keywords in your content, it will affect your site's ranking badly. 

In contrast, it does not mean that keywords do not matter in a website. What matters the most is to create high-quality content where the keywords can naturally work at their best. 

For creating an informative website, it's important to write web pages that clearly describe your topic. Think about what your users tend to search for and add that relevant information to your content. 

Thumb Rule: Each web page of your Website must include a single focus keyword that you must use 1-3 times naturally in the page content. Add that keyword in the page title, meta description, and headings.

5. Fails to Create a Correct URL Structure

A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is the web address we enter in the browser to navigate a page. Many designers treat URLs as an underlying part of SEO. You also make the biggest website redesign mistake if you are among them. 

Curious to know how a bad URL structure is one of the common website redesign mistakes?

Not only the searchers but the search engines are also precise to prefer those web pages and websites that have a URL describing the page and content. Given that, if your Website is besieged with a lengthy URL, you must implement the required changes to shorten the URL length. 

A lengthy URL is difficult to recognize, and it usually fails to depict what you want to describe to the users, negatively impacting your Website's rank on SERP. 

Thumb Rule: Keep the URL structure short and add primary and relevant keywords. Additionally, use a dash (-) instead of underscore (_) to define the URL clearly. With dashes, there are more chances of featuring the Website's URL in the search engine result pages. 

Redesigning a Website allows you to optimize URLs for UX and search engine robots properly.

6. Website Architecture

To be expressed, your website architecture is one of the important aspects which allows the search engine bots to understand your Website's purpose and index the pages. The website structure refers to how the web pages on your content are linked and organized. 

So, how does a website architecture affect SEO parameters?

In Website redesigning, page organization plays an important role in determining the organic traffic. It means every internal page of your Website has a different purpose, depending on its rank in the SERP. 

Whenever you are redesigning your Website, then it is going to change the internal linking structure. So, if you are redesigning your Website, we strongly suggest you create a strong sitemap, so that you can easily submit all the important pages of your Website to the search engine console. 

7. Not Allowing Search Engine Consoles to look for your Website

After spending hours and hours adding glorious design elements to your Website and designing it beautifully, now it's time to make your Website live!!

Even after making your Website live, if you are still waiting for Google to display your Website on the search engine result pages, you might have blocked your Website from appearing on the search engine result pages. 

Take a step back and recall: Have you unblocked the site before launching it? A silly issue can result in bringing huge problems. Sometimes, people forget to unblock the search engine robots to crawl and index your Website, even after making it live. 

To sidestep this issue, once your Website gets life, you must check the robots.txt file. Apart from this, if you want to make sure that your site is getting indexed, then make sure to double-check it with Google Webmaster tools. 

8. Not Understanding the Visitor's Mindset

Google responds faster to queries that include complete sentences or questions. Consequently, the search engine results are becoming more conversational, and you can only win if your Website shows the information meant for visitors, not the robots. 

Avoid writing a robotic pool of content and start providing the fresh content your audience is searching for. So, start thinking like a human. The best solution to fix this issue is to focus on creating values for your personas and providing the best user experience. 

By focusing on these parameters, your website SEO will automatically take care of itself. 

9. Launching the Website Without Open Graph

An open graph is a piece of code used by social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc., and is used to get more relevant information from the web page, at the time when a user shares the Website on social media platforms. These social codes are a steady source of boosting web traffic and conversion. 

People are excited to share the website links through social networks when you launch a site. With this intention, if you use Open Graph codes on your Website, whenever a visitor shares your site on social media platforms or emails, it will correctly display the content.

CMS like WordPress, Blue Compass, etc., allows you to create social descriptions and images for every page. Given that reason, we strongly suggest you upload a relevant and branded image on each page so that the shared links will entitle the users to click on the link and explore your Website. 

10. Fails to get Backlinks and Inbound Links

Last but not the last point in website redesign mistakes is poor sourcing of backlinks. 

A backlink is created when a page of another website links to a page on yours. These backlinks are important for search engines as they act as a signal that the site being linked to has some quality and relevant information. 

Sometimes, the backlinks can be toxic to your website's credibility. If your Website is linked with low-quality websites indulging in spamming, then Google will decrease your website's rank. It is also called negative SEO. 

At times, the spammers can deliberately link your Website with low-quality websites to encourage negative SEO of your site. Here, you can use the Google webmaster tool to prevent the Website from negative SEO. 

Thumb Rule: Keep yourself focused on earning strong backlinks instead of creating backlinks. 

To Summarize

The key strength for the survival of an online business is getting continuous traffic on your Website. Traffic is the lifeblood of business, and it suddenly stops, then your company will start becoming dead limb by limb until the blood flow is restored and customers are still returning. This post has discussed the 10 most common SEO mistakes you must avoid while redesigning your Website. If you want to hire a professional.  If you are new to technology and need help redesigning a website, then we suggest you reach out to website redesign companies. We at UnibizTec are a team of highly experienced SEO and web designing members. We are committed to providing exceptional results for our clients within a short time frame. You can speak with our team to understand how we can redesign your website so that you can maintain the current SEO results.