Redesigning your brand’s website or extending it to new domains can bring about enormous changes in traffic and rankings. So if you own a business with an online presence, it’s important to innovate and update your website regularly to stay ahead of your competition.
But making major changes to your website is a complicated undertaking. So before editing your website, consider these five factors to maintain and improve your search rankings.
Consider the Site’s Architecture
When making changes to a website, the first thing to consider is how it’s organized; also known as “taxonomy.” The ideal site structure consists of some product or service categories, with additional sub-categories for variants.
You need to identify whether you need to maintain the current taxonomy if your rankings are already good, or update it in order to boost poor rankings. If you don’t need to update your site architecture, the URLs and categories are kept the same.
Look for Any Broken Internal Links
While making changes to a website, keep an eye out for broken links. If you come across any broken links, that could indicate a problem with the site changes. Running this diagnostic will tell you that something’s problematic, but won’t reveal what the problem actually is.
Look for Thin Pages
Switching to a different domain or content management system can lead to thin pages. A thin page is one with shrunken content or content that’s less dense than other web pages.
Run an audit on your website using an SEO Audit tool to identify any thin pages.
Look for Any Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is generally nothing to be worried about. Google fixes this issue itself by picking a single page of the website to rank and assigning all the links from duplicate pages to this one selected page.
Stage the New Site
Staging mean developing a similar copy of the new website on a separate server. This staged site must be protected with a password and access from all search engines must be blocked. When this staged site is created, run diagnostic tests and fix any errors before unblocking the new site to search engines.
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