Website redesign: impact on SEO rankings?

[Kal-SEO]

Hi

We're redesigning a website for a client whose SEO rankings are fairly strong, and are driving a good volume of enquiries through their website. We would like to do our best to ensure the redesign has a minimal impact on the rankings but aren't sure if there's anything in particular we should be doing to avert a severe dip in results. The content will be similar on many pages, with the major updates being from 2013 products to the 2014 suite. Layouts and images will, of course be updated, and we're going to do our best to keep the inbound links going to the correct place - any advice here would be much appreciated, too.

We'd be really grateful for any suggestions for how to avoid a ranking disaster, and any major pitfalls we should look out for.

Many thanks.

[mememax]

I agree with EGOL. I think that a new design should improve User experience on the site and all related metrics. In this case we're speaking about the same list EGOL says, from bounce rate to conversion rate and from time on site to internal navigation. This should be tested using an A/B platform or whatever ensures you're not changing from one day to another without knowing the effect of the new design. This requires good tools and time (optimizely may be one).

A new design may also improve SEO rankings and in my opinion this means, all changes made in development of the site:

• SPEED: improving CSS and javascripts, using of sprites and the things which may help you speeding up your site (google loves that!)
• URL REDESIGN: if URLs are completely messed up it could be good to review them and write more user friendly URLs. BEWARE! this may cause your rankings to dance a bit, due to 301s and changes effects. 301s can be set up in a wrong way and even if set up correctly may lose some value of the old page, so if you really NEED to update your URLs structure be sure of the benefits of that. If you're not sure DON'T CHANGE THEM.
• EXPERIENCE: It's a really great opportunity to make the most of mobile increasing traffic and build a responsive UI, compelling with experiences throughout all the devices.

All of the above can be an additional value but consider design as an effect mainly focused on improving user experience.on the site rather than googlebot. Try to improve user experience metrics and to not HURT SEO this by maintaining the code as it is, improving it but not changing it, without changes on site contet, without changingn meta data and URL (if you don't have a clear plan on how to take advantage of that change), hope this helps!

[Kal-SEO]

Hi, perhaps I should have specified that it's a short term dip we're concerned about - 2/3 weeks - rather than long term. Our goal is to improve the performance of the site, of course, and enhance the user experience whilst, hopefully, driving more business for our client. Thanks for your response and suggestions.

[Silkstream]

We recently redesigned a site which had strong rankings and learnt a valuable lesson about defining URL parameters using webmaster tools.

Basically, the new site used filters and this caused a whole load of duplicate content, causing the site to drop from postion 1-3 for every core keyword to approx position 8-10.

I didn't even know that tool existed until i asked on Moz and its been a lifesaver.

[EGOL]

"We would like to do our best to ensure the redesign has a minimal impact on the rankings but aren't sure if there's anything in particular we should be doing to avert a severe dip in results."

A design change is the time when you should be striving to improve the rankings - not worrying about a "severe dip in results".

You should be looking to improve your...

** on-page optimization

** internal navigation

** visitor time-on-site

** bounce rate

** conversion rate

** htaccess and CMS to prevent duplicate URLs and other problems

You need a plan to IMPROVE every one of these.

If you have any doubts about how to improve these then you might want to hire someone who has successfully done the redesign of many sites and understands how improvements in the design that will lift the rankings.