SEO Preservation Services
As a business owner, you know the value of website’s SEO to attract new clients, improve brand recognition and succeed in your industry. You’ve probably implemented various SEO techniques to improve your site’s visibility and traffic. Even if you’ve never implemented any SEO, don’t assume there are no risks to making site changes without considering the SEO impact to your website.
The constant evolution of the internet and the online marketplace makes it vital to regularly evaluate ways you may improve your website. However, it can be easy to accidentally undo all your SEO work without proper planning.
SEO Preservation can ensure you maintain, and even improve your SEO when you update your website. As soon as you decide to make design or domain changes to your website, the first step should be creating a plan to preserve your SEO.
WHAT IS SEO PRESERVATION?
SEO Preservation can refer to a number of different actions and strategies designed to preserve a site’s SEO during and after a rebrand, redesign, site migration or upgrade. Because so many SEO strategies rely on behind-the-scenes management of the internal structure of a website, changing your site’s infrastructure can wreak havoc on your SEO if proper preparations aren’t made in advance. Updating, rebranding, or website migrations often results in a wide variety of changes that can have a dramatic negative effect on a site’s SEO, including:
- Redesigning without Goals
- Choosing the Wrong CMS and Hosting Provider
- Not Considering Mobile/Multiplatform Performance
- Removing, Moving and Changing Page Content
- Changing the Domain or Page URLs
- Missing or Duplicate Tags
- Broken Links/Improper Use of Redirects
- Changes to the Site Hierarchy
- Protocol Issues
SEO Preservation minimizes the negative impact that site changes would have on your search rankings. A good strategy can even leverage aspects of the new site to increase visibility and traffic. Some common aspects of SEO Preservation include auditing your existing site, auditing your new site, analyzing the data to determine how planned changes would affect your SEO, then consulting and implementing solutions to preserve your website’s SEO page rankings and traffic.
HOW DO YOU PRESERVE SEO?
SEO Preservation can be a complex process requiring data collection, analysis, and a deep understanding of your site’s infrastructure and existing SEO techniques. By necessity, the exact steps of SEO Preservation will be unique to your website. However, there are three overarching elements:
- Diagnosing what is working well with your current site’s SEO
- Understanding issues with changes that commonly occur during a site upgrade or redesign
- Managing the SEO during the transition to a new website
Each of these concepts may incorporate several steps during practical application. Some common tasks include the following:
- Crawl your current website to get information on its structure, layout, and metadata
- Perform an audit of your current site to understand how your existing SEO works, find any existing problems and establish benchmarks
- Develop of a test version of your new site on a temporary URL with settings that discourage search engine indexing
- Crawl and test the new website to understand its structure and see how it compares to your old site
- Gather and analyze data from the new site to identify problems and fix them
- Submit the new site XML to search engines
- Monitor the performance of the new site for ongoing SEO
PROTECT YOUR SEO AND CREATE NEW OPPORTUNITIES
It’s essential to keep your company’s website up to date; regular upgrades increase brand cohesion and ensure have the best user experience. When you’re ready to redesign your site, you can protect search engine rankings by developing and following an SEO Preservation plan.
Effective SEO Preservation planning and implementation can be a complex and time-consuming process, so it’s a great candidate for outsourcing. Professional SEO managers can ensure your search ranking status withstands changes to your website. With an expert guiding your SEO, you can feel confident that your site will continue to perform well after every update.
Did You Know?
53% of all website traffic comes from organic search
Nearly 60% of all online searches are now carried out on a mobile device
47% of 250,000 websites sampled had Error 404 (Page not found) issues
SEO PRESERVATION FAQS
How often should a site be redesigned?
As a rule of thumb, you should redesign your website once every 2 to 3 years to keep it from getting outdated.
How long does SEO Preservation take?
Ideally the SEO Preservation process begins as soon as the decision is made to rebrand, redesign or migrate your website so your SEO can provide valuable input early in the planning stages for your new website. It winds down after the new site goes live and passes its final audit checks to transition seamlessly into your SEO service.
How long should redirects remain in place?
We agree with Google Search Advocate, John Mueller’s recommendation that redirects should remain in place for at least a year.
The best time to implement an SEO preservation plan is before you make significant changes to your site’s design or are changing websites. If you are looking to update your site soon, SEO Rocket can help preserve your SEO rankings and traffic.
