Protecting Your SEO While Updating Your Website
In our experience at Developing Designs, it’s always best to include an SEO expert during the website update. Otherwise, there’s a strong likelihood that you’re new “and improved” web design will wreak havoc with your SEO. It is possible, of course, to update your website without harming your SEO, and we can tell you how.
First Things First
The SEO experts at Developing Designs find that it’s essential to begin the protection process with an SEO crawl of the existing site. This provides us with a detailed roadmap of the site. At some point, we’ll want to make sure this roadmap of important data matches the new site. Before we get excited about the updates ahead with a brand new website, we continue to work with the old site. We perform a detailed audit to find out about any problems with the SEO. We definitely don’t want to carry these problems over into the improved website.
The Test Site
When working with the test site for a client’s new design, we make sure it’s not indexed with Google. This is a draft, after all, and we don’t want Google looking at it at this stage. Then we crawl the test site just as we did with the original site. This allows us to compare data and make sure that all the essential data matches up the way we want it to. Analyzing the data is where our SEO specialists shine. It’s not an easy task, but it’s the only way to thoroughly protect your SEO. In fact, it’s so important, that we repeat the analyzing process.
Before going live, there are many other tasks and checks that need to occur to make sure your SEO is protected. Naturally, we also need to optimize any new website pages and features in the improved design before we invite Google to index the new site. In the end, your new website launch will be poised to increase traffic and business just as you hope it will, with SEO driving those numbers and doing the job you want it to.
Let us help you with your next website update or move. Contact us today.