Website Redesign SEO, Relaunch, Post-launch & SEO Audit

Are you planning on doing a website redesign and relaunching soon? Well, congratulations. That is a major undertaking that will help you to realize your goals.

However, an website redesign SEO can easily become a disaster if not done correctly. Your site’s traffic can be hugely impacted by any changes made to your website’s design, and it might also make it not so search engine friendly.

Whatever you want to do — maybe you want to create an international site, switch to HTTPS, or simply want to conduct a rebranding strategy, you must ensure your traffic and ranking remain the same.

To be on the safe side, you need a proper SEO audit to identify potential pitfalls prior to the launch. This gives you ample time to work on any issues before replacing your current website.

This post takes you through the precise steps involved in a successful website redesign SEO. Click the button below to get the complete SEO website redesign checklist.

Here are our key takeaways:

A successful website relaunch and post-launch redesign require careful attention to SEO strategies.

By conducting a pre-launch SEO audit, preserving key SEO elements, optimizing content, ensuring proper indexing, enhancing user experience, monitoring performance, and engaging in link building activities, you can position your website for increased visibility, organic traffic, and long-term success.

Embrace these key takeaways, adapt them to your unique circumstances, and embark on your website relaunch journey with confidence.

Types of SEO Audit in Website Redesign

A typical SEO audit encompasses various concepts, including content, links, image, meta, visibility, and semantic issues. This may sound like a lot, but there are over 200 factors that your website’s ranking depends on.

Unlike a typical SEO audit, a website relaunch SEO audit looks at both the old and new sites. A multilingual website design requires one to check the performance not only on both the old and new sites, but in all site variations.

If you have done SEO before, then you may not have a difficult time getting started. However, a website relaunch SEO audit may not be straightforward.

This is because it may be difficult to crawl it with traditional SEO tools. Such websites are often hidden behind robot files, internal servers, and also password protection that may make it quite impossible for the audit tools to work.

A website redesign SEO audit checklist involves going back to the basics and manually confirming all the key aspects.

When conducting a website redesign SEO audit, it’s crucial to consider technical aspects like page loading speeds, URL structures, and image optimization, which may require specialized website migration services to ensure a seamless transition and maintain your SEO performance.

When performing a website SEO relaunch audit, we break it down into two main parts: pre-launch and post-launch.

Pre-launch SEO Audit

When performing a website redesign, you will have a few things changing that may impact your SEO traffic and ranking. To be on the safe side, you should have a solid website prelaunch checklist to resolve any pending issues before they go to the live site.

Although you can simply sit back and wait to perform a post-launch SEO audit, it is much better to catch and fix the issues before your audience and search engines discover them. This means you can reduce the risk of search ranking penalties, which may negatively affect your SEO efforts.

You can go through our website redesign SEO audit checklist for a comprehensive guide on what exactly to do. But in a nutshell, your pre-launch audit should, at minimum, cover the following:

Analytics review

A key consideration to make before going live with a new site is to ensure that your web analytics continues to seamlessly track data from your old website to the new one.

It might be unpleasing when you lose your data or later find out that your tracking isn’t consistent, especially if you were pulling year-over-year data. Ensure to add annotations that can help you easily identify and track your data from the relaunch date.

Technical review

Your current website may be doing well with SEO, but did you know this may not directly relate to your new site? In most cases, during a redesign or migration, your website tends to lose various aspects, and one of the major changes is the technical SEO.

When working on your staging site, you should consider conducting a comprehensive staging website SEO audit — use our website redesign SEO checklist for a step-by-step guide.

You have to consider the page loading speeds, URL structures, image optimization, etc., and ensure to go page by page. You also have to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly before taking it live.

Before launching your new site, you also have to ensure that it is mobile-friendly. Google’s mobile-first index may make you lose ranking if your usability is poor. If you don’t know how to perform a technical SEO audit, you can always count on a reliable SEO technical audit service for assistance.

When preparing for a website redesign or migration, don’t forget to check out our comprehensive technical SEO guide to ensure a smooth transition and maintain your SEO performance.

Content review

If your website now works well, with no technical SEO issues detected, you have to focus on your content. Does it deliver? Go through the images and confirm that they are all appropriate for each page.

Ensure that your content adheres to Google’s E-A-T guidelines by curating content that is useful and relevant. Moreover, ensure that you have an innovative call to action on your content before taking it public.

When working on a multilingual or e-commerce website, you have to pay attention to each detail on all the variations on the website. You can use our free multilingual website SEO audit template to get started.

Link review

In the ever-evolving world of SEO, understanding the principles of white hat link building is crucial to navigate the complexities of today’s search engine algorithms and ensure your website’s credibility. SEO used to be just all about the linking structure of a website. Today, you have to check various factors, including the type of content linking to you, the type of website, how valuable the pages linking to you are, and also if you are linking to other valuable pages. Therefore, link building strategies matter and must be carefully done.

Moreover, besides the internal and external linking review, you should also watch out for any changing URLs. Ensure that you have mapped out your 301 redirects properly. This means that search engines, like Google and Bing, will not penalize you and will replace the redirected URLs on their indexing.

Benchmarking

Once you are done with the crucial website redesign SEO bit, it is recommended to benchmark your site. Consider the organic traffic to your site from various search engines and the high-traffic keywords that you have.

You can use these metrics as a measure of success for the new site to ensure that your SEO efforts are on track.

Post-launch SEO Audit

Congratulations that your website is now live. You have done so much work to get it search-engine friendly. However, SEO is a continuous process, and your work may just be far from over — but at least you will have already handled the heavy lifting.

You will have to closely monitor your website for changes in rankings, traffic, and page load speeds, among others.

We recommend running these checks at least daily using precise technical SEO audit tools. You can, thereafter, shift the checks to weekly or monthly when there’s been a good trend.

In case you see any dips in traffic or any SEO errors, you should have a look at some factors, including:

Visibility

Ensure that all your pages are visible not just to your visitors but also to the search engines. Watch out for any unchanged robots.txt file when setting up the new site, as it may block search engine bots from crawling your site.

If you use your website for selling, ensure to conduct a solid e-commerce SEO audit and ensure all products are well visible on search engines.

Meta titles and descriptions

One of the biggest ranking factors for your web content is the meta descriptions used and meta titles. Ensure that they all are well-optimized for your specific content. At times, you can use tools like Yoast SEO or Rankmath to optimize your content for SEO success.

Links

During your pre-launch website SEO audit checklist, you ensured that you had no broken links and that you correctly implemented 301 redirects for broken URLs. In this stage, you should also look at your outbound and inbound linking structure and ensure that it does not negatively impact your ranking.

Images

Images play a huge part in the ways both visitors and search engines view your page. Broken images, missing ALT texts, and irrelevant titles can affect your overall SEO ranking. Ensure that you conduct an audit on all your images to avoid any of those issues.