How to avoid SEO pitfalls when redesigning your website

Imagine for a moment that search engines use the HTML of your pages to give meaning to your content…

Gary Illyes, the genius behind Google, revealed on his LinkedIn profile that changes such as removing H tags in favour of CSS, separating paragraphs or adding break tags for CJK languages can alter the results of HTML crawlers and, as a result, impact your site’s ranking. But don’t panic, our experts will show you how to avoid falling into these traps!

Before diving headlong into redesigning your site, take the time to carry out an in-depth analysis. Dive into the intricacies of your search engine optimisation:

• Analyse your current performance: Start by collecting accurate data about your current website. Use analysis tools such as Google Analytics or Search Console to obtain information on visitor acquisition, the keywords that generate organic traffic, the most visited pages, the bounce rate, the time spent on the site, etc. This in-depth analysis will give you an overview of your site’s current situation and its SEO performance.
• Identify relevant keywords: Explore the keywords that generate organic traffic on your site, but also on those of your competitors. Use keyword research tools such as SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner to identify the most searched-for terms in your field of activity. This will enable you to understand the keywords on which you are well positioned, those that need to be improved or those for which there is an opportunity. Keep these important keywords in mind throughout the redesign, so that you can incorporate them judiciously into your new site.
• Examine your backlinks: Backlinks are essential for boosting your site’s authority and improving your SEO. Analyse your existing backlinks and identify quality links from relevant and reliable sites. Make sure you preserve these links during the redesign by using appropriate 301 redirects to maintain your site’s authority and relevance.
• Make a content inventory: Review the content of your existing site and assess its quality, relevance and success. Identify the pages that generate the most traffic, the most popular articles and the pages with obsolete or duplicated content. This analysis will enable you to determine which content should be preserved, improved or removed during the redesign.

This first step will enable you to make informed decisions throughout the redesign process.

To avoid making fatal mistakes during the migration, it’s essential to plan each stage meticulously. Draw up an exhaustive list of your site’s existing URLs.

But that’s not all! 301 redirects will become your essential allies in transferring the power of your old pages to the new ones. Setting up 301 redirects will tell search engines that the content has been moved permanently. 301 redirects therefore make it possible to transfer the “referencing juice” from the old pages to the new ones, avoiding loss of traffic and ranking.

Your quality content is the focal point of your SEO. Whether it’s text, images or videos, your content is the real asset that attracts visitors and search engines to your site. Here are a few tips for preserving and optimising it:

• Identify your high-performance content: As explained above, an in-depth analysis of your site is necessary to identify the pages that generate the most organic traffic, have the most engagement and obtain quality backlinks.
• Refresh and improve your existing content: Take advantage of the redesign to update and improve your existing content. Revise texts to make them more punchy, correct any errors or inconsistencies, and add additional relevant information. Make sure your content meets the needs and search intentions of your target audience.
• Optimise your meta tags: Make sure that your meta tags provide an accurate description of the content of your page, so that users have a clear idea of what they will find. A relevant and attractive description will encourage users to click on your site in the search results. However, it is important not to mislead users by using irrelevant keywords or creating misleading descriptions. If your meta tag doesn’t match the actual content of the page, you risk getting a high bounce rate, which tells search engines that your site isn’t meeting users’ expectations, which can lead to a drop in search rankings.
• Opt for high-quality media: When redesigning your site, make sure you choose high-quality media that are attractive and relevant to your theme. Optimise images by compressing them without compromising their quality, use descriptive ALT tags for images to improve their understanding by search engines, and add transcripts for videos to improve their accessibility and referencing.

Create new and compelling content: As well as preserving your existing content, take advantage of the redesign to create new and compelling content. Add relevant blog posts, case studies, customer testimonials or additional resources that add value to your site and can generate additional organic traffic. Make sure you optimise this new content for the relevant keywords identified in the preliminary analysis.

Before unveiling your new site to your target audience, get ready to go through the final testing stage. Code validation is an essential step in ensuring that your website complies with the standards of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – the standards body that sets the standards for web development languages such as HTML and CSS. To validate your code, you can use online tools such as the W3C HTML validator (https://validator.w3.org/) and the CSS validator (https://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/). These tools analyse your code and report errors and warnings, providing valuable indications of problems that need to be corrected. Make sure you correct any errors reported before you put your site online to ensure a flawless user experience.

Although code validation is not a direct search engine ranking factor, it does have an indirect impact on your SEO. Search engines such as Google prefer sites that are well structured and easy to interpret. By validating your code, you make it easier for search engines to understand the structure of your site, index your content correctly and present it to users in a relevant way.