TRAFFIC
crawl your site and show you how different
content elements are re-used across it.
Migration and final checks
If you have successfully completed the
checks listed above, you should now be
confident your new design does not violate
any key SEO best practice, performs better
than the old one, has an improved internal
linking structure and does not present any
significant case of internal duplication. You
are now ready to “migrate” your site, i.e.
putting your old site off-line and replacing it
with its redesigned version.
However, as said in the introduction to
this article, redesigning a website also very
often involves re-platforming it, which
means its URLs tend to change. If this is
the case, then the job is not finished yet, as
you should make sure each and every old
URL redirects via a server-side, permanent
(301) redirect towards its corresponding
new URL, and that each destination URL
correctly answers with a 200 status code and
the right content. The safest way to do this
is using a crawling tool like ScreamingFrog
to crawl all your new and old URLs
(you can use historical data from Google
Analytics10 if you did not save them before
the migration of the site). While conducting
this check, special attention should of course
be paid to the URLs of your most important
pages (see section 1).
Once your new design is online and
you have correctly redirected old URLs,
you should closely monitor any significant
changes in Google’s crawling stats via
Google Search Console11. If your site’s code
and architecture really has improved, you
should as a result see more pages getting
crawled, more data being downloaded every
day and less time being spent by Google to
Figure 7: Analysis of organic traffic changes following a website
redesign
Various page types and site sections
old site
Daily organic traffic per area
30
download each page (see Figure 6).
Apart from crawling stats, you should of
course also keep an eye on your rankings
and traffic. More specifically, I recommend
aggregating your traffic and conversion data
before and after the migration at pagetype and site-section level in Excel. In this
way you will be able to easily see how the
redesign impacted different areas of your
site (See Figure 7).
As we have seen, changes in the front-end
and back-end of a website may be critical
in terms of SEO, as they may impact a
site’s crawlability, perceived quality and
- ultimately - search engine rankings and
organic traffic. Since redesigning a website
means modifying several front-end (and
often back-end) aspects, the SEO risks
of even small mistakes in the redesign
and migration processes are significant.
However, adopting the right strategy and
conducting checks like those described in
this article can help to safely improve a
site’s design also in terms of SEO, hopefully
leading to significant ranking and traffic
improvements, so do not be too afraid and...
fingers crossed for your next redesign!
redesign
MATTEO MONARI
is COO of BizUp, a
results-driven Internet
marketing agency
specialising in competitive
segments and international
link building. After heading the
SEO department of Europe’s leading
content-on-demand company, Matteo
is now leading BizUp’s link-building
team, providing links in ten languages
to clients in more than 20 different
countries. He has worked for some
of the biggest affiliates and operators
in the iGaming world. You can follow
Matteo on Twitter @matteo_monari
or email him at
[email protected].
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iGB Affiliate Issue 55 FEB/MAR 2016
10
https://analytics.google.com
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/