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Keeping Your SEO Ranking Up While Your Website Is Down

How to Avoid Losing Traffic After Redesigning Your Website
Keep your brand on top of SERPs.
Every site will require a redesign at some point in time. Redesigning is an important step to ensure your site doesn’t look outdated or no longer fulfills the needs of the online user. In fact, revamping your website can help you to increase traffic, conversions, and sales but it has to be done right.
Unfortunately, many website designers are taking on redesign projects without planning ahead of time. Among the important issues to consider when redesigning a site is how to avoid traffic drops during the site redesign. Your sit can lose substantial traffic days or even weeks after the new design is launched. We’ve seen this happening quite often. As a reliable provider of web design Toronto, we’ll share with you tips to avoid these traffic drops and keep your brand on top of SERPs.

What causes traffic to drop after redesigning your site?

Before we get to how to avoid traffic drops following a redesign, it’s important to understand the causes of the drop in website traffic. First things first, you need to understand that a minor drop in traffic when you launch the new site is quite normal. Therefore, don’t panic if you notice a decline of less than 10% of your previous traffic after uploading the new site. This temporary decline in traffic is because Google has to crawl and index the new pages. However, traffic shouldn’t drop significantly for more than a few days. If it does, it’s probably a big issue that needs to be addressed.

Set up proper redirects

One common cause of traffic drops after a website redesign is failure to set up proper redirects. While it’s not realistic to redesign a site and have no redirects, there are ways to make redirects work for you without compromising your site’s crawlability. Make sure any new pages that have been moved to a new location or any changes in URL structure are properly redirected to avoid an unnecessary traffic drop.

Create a new sitemap

This is often a necessary step if your site structure changed considerably after the redesign. The sitemap simply gives search engine crawlers a list of all the important pages on the site and speeds up the process of indexing the pages which means you can quickly restore traffic after the web design Toronto. Check all internal links to ensure none of them is outdated or that they don’t cause any crawl issue.

Use ranking keywords in your copy

If you create new pages that don’t use the keywords that they originally ranked for, you may lose substantial traffic due to this. Your site will not show up on search if it no longer has the information that it was ranking for. Work with a SEO to help you determine which pages rank for what target keywords so that you can maintain some of the content and avoid losing relevant traffic after the redesign. In fact, consulting with a SEO agency throughout the process helps to avoid issues that affect traffic in the long run. The SEOs will go through your site and take an inventory of all the top-ranking pages so that they can maintain the valuable information in the redesigned version. You can also use this information to build a new site structure that works for your brand.

Ensure the analytics tracking code is in place

Before you launch the new site, make sure you’re able to track your website traffic. This means the Analytics code should be in place. It may seem obvious but it’s one area that many designers overlook when redesigning a site.

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