Creating a new website for your brand is an extremely important thing to do for any business to keep up with the times. Letting your website get too outdated will make you seem inferior compared to the competition and it could eventually start to impact your lead/business flow. We often see that website designers don’t build their new websites with SEO in mind and while the new site might look more professional it actually brings in less business. It will often bring in less business because the businesses SEO ends up tanking! Luckily, it doesn’t have to be this way… if you are thinking of building a brand new website and launching it, please sure that you go though this checklist prior to going live!
Website Launch Checklist To Keep SEO Rankings:
1. Transfer Over As Many Pages as Possible: While SEO has evolved over the years, content is still KING! We see website designers recommend that their clients go simple and go clean which often means stripping text off pages and cutting down websites by hundreds of pages. This will immediately kill your SEO, as all these pages work together to help your website show up. There are creative ways to modernize and simplify a website without taking out all the pages!
2. Keep URL structure the same and set up 301 redirects: Since our first suggestion was to bring over as many pages as possible, we also want to make sure that the URL structure is staying the same for those pages. If the URLs change, those first page placements that you have will turn into dead 404 errors! If for some reason you do need to update URLs or remove pages, be sure that you set up 301 redirects. That can ensure a nice user experience and it can also swap a url on Google with the new redirected page.
3. Transfer Over Meta Data: Meta data is the text that shows up when you make a physical search on Google. Each page has its own custom page title and meta description and we always recommend that when launching a new site to keep the meta data the same as what it was before. When launching a new site, we are trying to shock website visitors but we are not trying to confuse and shock Google!
After seeing these three bullet points, we are sure that see the trend here… show Google the same bones of a websites with a facelift visually. This way they will see it as the same business, the same services, all with a fresh new look.
Additional Things to Ensure You Checkoff Your List:
- Reverify Google Search Console
- Set up internal linking structure
- Optimize H tags correctly
For more information about SEO or website design, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Boston Web Marketing. We are a leading digital marketing agency based out of Boston Massachusetts that would be more than willing to help you out!