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When a website gets revamped, numerous changes happen within the code resulting in broken links, loss of historical data, etc. Often businesses wonder why there is a drop in SEO right after a website redesign, without understanding what it does. It often results in Page rank drop and traffic loss. If complete revamping is your only choice, then engage the top web design companies to handle the shift.
Roadmap the existing site
Before or after considering a revamp, first go through the existing site. Only if you know what is present, can you isolate where the changes have been made and what kind of impact it has caused. Prepare a hierarchy of how the original site is layered.
This process is called an SEO crawl, and it gives you a roadmap of your existing site. There are several tools online that can do the job for you. Just enter the URL, and the tool perfectly lays out the structure and metadata. The data is used to plan the new site.
Audit the Existing site
With the data from the Site Crawler perform an audit of your existing site. There are tools to do it, but doing it yourself makes you aware of the parts of the site that are doing well and which parts are performing poorly.
Trawl the data for broken links, duplicated content, replicated titles, missing tags, canonical tags, image alt+text, etc. If you are looking over the data manually, you must check for Robot.txt, Site performance, URL structure, etc.
Non-Index your new site
After a detailed analysis of your old site, hand over your requirements to the web designer to create the test site. The top web design companies will have the new site non-indexed. It is to avoid Google from indexing the web pages before you have had a chance to correct any glitches. If Google indexes the first few drafts, then the actual new site will be taken as a duplicate of the initial drafts.
Perform an SEO crawl on the new site
The top web development companies in Chennai recommend crawling the test site before launching it. It is to find if the site’s structure and SEO are as you envisioned them to be. Compare the results with the existing site. Now you can work out the kinks from the test site if any parts of it don’t give the desired performance. Check for the following data from the reports like word count, internal and external linking, size, canonical tags, metadata, titles, etc. In the reports from the site crawler, you might notice that several elements have the number 1 or 2 next to them indicating their count. The following should not have a 2 next to them.
- Titles
- Meta Description
- Meta Keywords
- Canonical tag
- H1
Repeat the Process
Once you are satisfied that all the necessary changes have been made, repeat the entire process. It is to ensure that the changes you made don’t affect the website as a whole negatively. Religiously check for broken links with Error 200’s or 404. You can filter this out from the reports, making your job easier.
Final Checks
Once you are satisfied with how the test site came out on the site Crawler reports, there are a few additional checks to be performed.
Rank Check: Rank Checks analyze the performance of the keywords in searches. If there is a keyword jump from page 1 to say page 10, you need to recheck the metadata, non-indexing, and redirects.
Content Check: Retain as much of the old content as possible, making only minimal changes. Keep old blogs and valid infographics, as they contributed to the credibility of the site.
Unblock the site: Allow Google to index the site. Reverse the non-indexing process for the site to come up on SERPs.
Website revamping is a big decision that intimately affects your SEO performance. Only professional experts must handle it all the way. Open Designs is the Best web designing company in Chennai that has 20+ years of SEO experience. They are top-notch web developers that help you seamlessly transition from your old to the new site.
