Ever since you can remember, you probably have been taught that judging somebody with their appearance is terrible. In the world of marketing, your clients and prospects will ultimately judge your construction website by how it looks or is structured. This only means that you will have to update your construction website regularly.
Website redesigning is a no-brainer for digital marketers, SEO professionals, and marketing strategists. As a contractor who does not have any knowledge and experience with any of this but wanted to put some effort, this blog is for you. We are sharing some expert-level tips in redesigning and updating your website without even affecting your SEO.
Importance of SEO for Website Redesigning
It boils down to profit. In many cases, a web redesign is a marketing investment projected to further increase your revenue by increasing traffic and rankings. There is a good chance you are redesigning your construction website because you want it to look more appealing to your target audience. Right? In theory, a more attractive website can generate more revenue and produce ROI many times over.
As a starter, take note that your website has two functions:
- Attracting your primary target audience
- Engaging and converting the target audience once they make visits to your website
Redesigning your construction website without even considering SEO will neglect the first function. So, be careful about this. Neglecting SEO is the fastest way to waste years of your previous digital marketing investment. This will reduce your construction company’s profit and prolong the payback period for your web redesigning. You don’t want that to happen, right?
Best Tips on Redesigning Your Website without Affecting SEO
When you redesign your construction website without affecting SEO value, you are strengthening both of its primary functions. Your website will do a much better job attracting more prospects and helping to convert these prospects into paying customers.
So, the following construction website redesign checklist will ultimately help you navigate the redesign process without trying to lose your hard-earned rankings within some major search engines.
1. Discover and Take Inventory of Your Existing Website’s Pages
At this point, you need to run your existing data thru a refining phase, which enables you to understand how people view and use your website fully. After determining this out, it will be easier for you to remove the untuneful elements and retain the important ones on your website. Doing everything will also help you discover the critical signs for a quick website redesign/makeover without compromising the existing traffic.
After a careful analysis, a list of must-do enhancements must be made. Consider the following given questions below for a better understanding of your goals.
- What purpose does your construction website serve?
- Why does the existing current web design need to be improved?
- What should be your strategy for website redesigning?
In addition, each page on your construction website is a valuable asset when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. Hence, make a list of your construction pages in many different ways to understand more of your goals upon redesigning your website. The following tips can help you with your agenda.
- Use your sitemap
- Use a crawler
- Use Google’s index of your construction website
- Use Google Search Console
2. Craft or plan the new web designs
It is not that your role has ended once you have hired experienced marketing experts and web designers. It is all about that you need to be there to get things done as you desire. For instance, communicating the actual requirements and recognizing the accomplished redesigning work will help you save time. It is better to be involved and ask your digital marketing agency partner to keep in the loop for much better clarity and improved performance.
Your presence is crucial since the redesigning phase of your website includes a bunch of testing on the updated site. The website itself has to be strained with various tests to check for loopholes that may sour down the end-user experience.
You can layout criteria that will determine whether your website is either a failure or a success. Of course, always consider focusing and improving SEO elements apart from other aspects. Below are some tips that can help you get through this stage.
· Follow up for redesigning work regularly.
- Look for onsite content: landing page on your website
- Check out the operational/functional performance accurately
- Make sure proper integration of essential site elements
- Improve website responsiveness for all screen
- Check also if website uplifts are in sync with modern trends.
3. Implement Your Redesign site on the Staging Environment
Now that you have taken inventory of your current website and planned new designs, you are now ready to redesign a new version. To maintain SEO during the website redesigning process, you must have your design changes within a staging site. The major reason for using a separate environment during the redesigning process is to prevent having search engines crawl and index an unfinished version of your new website.
To prevent users and search engines from discovering your work in progress, ensure you avoid indexing your test website. Do the steps as follows:
- Click “Discourage Search Engines from indexing this site” when using WordPress.
- Disallow all robots from crawling into your website via the robot.txt file.
- Explicitly add a “no index” meta robot to each page.
4. Perform a Site Audit
If your website redesign only includes reskinning your current web pages, there would not be much new information to audit. If you have undergone a more extensive redesigning process, you may want a complete web redesign and audit.
Go for an in-depth guide when doing website analysis. Doing so will help you determine duplicate content that significantly causes you to lose SEO rank in the most unexpected ways.
5. Set Up 301 Redirects
When you use a 301 redirect, it instantly forwards a specific old URL to a new URL of your choice. It can also tell the search engines that everything is a permanent change, essential. When you use the 301, you’re keeping most of the SEO value attributed to the old pages by transferring it to the new ones. Hence, setting up the proper redirects is crucial to your website’s redesign and SEO.
This will eventually preserve your website functionality and your past link-building investments. Take note of the following this below when setting up 301 redirects:
- For WordPress Websites, setting up a 301 redirect is easier if you are using WordPress. It is highly recommended to use a redirection plug-in. Download it thru the plug-in directory in the WordPress backend, and follow the easy instructions that these plug-in authors laid out.
- For other websites – If you are using different CMS for your site, it might already have a built-in redirect functionality for the website pages. Access the CMS knowledge base or do some quick Google search to determine if that is the case.
6. Activate Your Redesigned Website
Once you have set up the redesign output and your new construction website is ready for users to see, it is time to activate your web design finally. Web designers will usually do the heavy lifting during this particular step. But as the owner, you need to be hands-on too. Try to double-check that everything is working as being planned.
You cannot improve your SEO strategy if you do not possess complex data backing up all the decisions you make. Hence, make sure tracking codes are set up as you collect data. In addition, also discover other major items you may want to consider after launching your newly redesigned website.
7. Monitor SEO ranking changes
Perhaps at this point, the work is all done, and you are ready to continuously monitor new upcoming data about your conversions, rankings, and overall performance. Now that you have got access to your data, it is up to your marketing teams to learn how to select marketing KPIs that matter.
Keep also in mind, a successfully implemented website redesign plan may not instantly improve your SEO results. However, that is just fine! Your goal is to maintain the SEO value that your construction website has accumulated.
ConstructionMarketing.io can Guide Your Web Design and SEO Efforts for Higher Returns.
The above-cited steps are the things you have to follow when considering redesigning your website without losing SEO value. However, if you plan to do this by yourself, it may not be a good idea. It’s smart and practical for you to know the basics, but website redesigning is never your forte.
To avoid expensive and irreversible corrections later, you must hire a full-service digital marketing agency like us. Here at ConstructionMarketing.io, we are experts in website development for construction companies. We also offer SEO guidance for all construction company sizes, big or small.
We can make website redesigning more responsive and functional while preserving your SEO rankings. Talk to us today and allow us to help you with your digital marketing needs.