We're planning a major website redevelopment - SEO Considerations?

Sam.at.Moz

We're currently planning a website rehaul, with a new site to be designed and implemented on our existing Drupal 7 platform.

I've outlined the following areas to consider:

Listing out top content by traffic, conversions, ranking and bounce rates to ensure top content continues to get relevant links throughout site (in particular high internal PA links!).
Maintaining a specific KW target for each page
Ensuring on-page SEO guidelines remain (i.e. img alt tags, headings and page titles)
Having a low page load speed
Ensuring architecture of site is built around our keyword methodology

What else I need to be aware of?

I'm predicting a drop in traffic as this tends to follow redesigns but looking to make this as minimal as possible.

Sam

Joe.Robison

Try to isolate as many changes as possible.

Everyone wants to do a big splash relaunch, but unless you're a serious brand, you don't need to do some fancy huge explosive relaunch.

Each of these are big variables, and are best to not do all at once:

The worst is when people try to do all of those at once! It seems that you're staying on Drupal. The above article mentioned by Dirk is very good.

A few things to always remember:

Noindex/hide your development/staging site
Always double check your robots.txt after launch
Always double check your Meta Robots directive after launch
Always 301 redirect page for page your important pages receiving links and traffic if those change
Verify before and after everything in Analytics and Search Console
Create a checklist of everything. Almost 100% of even the smartest people will miss at least one thing in a relaunch.

DirkC

There is a very useful & detailed post on site migration on Moz - I used on two previous migrations and it worked great (no traffic drop at all) - check https://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

Dirk

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