10 Ways to Retain Your Google Rankings When Relaunching Your Website
Key Takeaways:
Redesigning your website without losing your Google search rankings is crucial. Here’s a quick checklist to ensure a smooth transition:
- Audit current content and benchmark performance
- Keep existing URLs if possible, use 301 redirects where it’s not
- Run a crawl on your new site to find and fix any broken links
- Use indexing reports in Google Search Console to identify any issues
- Ensure your XML sitemaps are updated and resubmit to Google
- Request link updates from external sites that still point to old URLs
- Test in Google’s PageSpeed Insights for performance, accessibility and best practices
- Ensure the new site is technically sound and SEO-friendly.
If you’re redesigning your website and already have good search rankings on Google, how do you ensure the rankings don’t take a hit when the new site launches?
It’s a question we hear all the time, and plenty has already been written on the subject of how to maintain search engine rankings.
In this blog, we’ll offer you a checklist of the key steps you need to take so you don’t lose your search engine ranking when you launch your new website. Let’s get started!
1. Plan Thoroughly
Audit Existing Content: Review your current site to understand what content is performing well and therefore needs keeping, and what content needs improvement.
Benchmark Current Performance: Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to view current traffic, keyword rankings, user engagement and behaviour.
2. Maintain URL Structure
Preserve Existing URLs: Try to keep the same URLs for existing content wherever possible, especially if there is no compelling reason to change them!
3. Use 301 Redirects
Implement 301 Redirects: If URL changes are necessary, use 301 (i.e. permanent) redirects to inform Google that the content has moved and to ensure users following old links are taken to the new location. This passes on most of the existing ‘link juice’ to the new URL and helps Google update its index and understand your new website structure.
4. Update Internal Links
Correct Internal Links: If you or your SEO agency have been doing your SEO work properly, your website will have lots of internal links between your service pages, blog posts, products and taxonomies (where applicable). If changing some or all of your URLs has been unavoidable, then you may find that lots of internal links (usually those within page content) are now pointing to old URLs. Although the redirects you’ve set up (see point 3 above!) will take users to the new URLs, these are primarily for external links and direct traffic, they should not be relied on and used as part of your internal linking structure. Any internal links pointing at old URLs should therefore be found and updated to link straight to the correct/new locations.
5. Check for Crawl Errors
Resolve 404 Errors: Following on from point 4 and in an ideal world, you should already have updated any old links and therefore have no internal 4xx response codes (i.e. ‘not found’ responses). But reality is often not so perfect and a few 404s may remain undiscovered. This is where you can use the indexing reports in Google Search Console, one of which monitors 404s and displays them in a list that also includes the ‘last crawled’ date. Any of these that have a relatively recent date are likely to still be linked to, whether internally or externally, so will require investigation and appropriate action to be taken once found.
6. Update Sitemaps
Submit Updated Sitemap: Update and submit your XML sitemaps to Google Search Console, to inform Google of all your new site’s URLs, using this universal format. This helps Google to index your new or updated pages quickly (any very important new URLs can also be submitted to Google individually and a request made to index them as a priority).
7. Monitor Backlinks
Retain Backlink Equity: Backlinks from reputable and relevant websites are still a valuable ranking signal for search. So if such links exist, contact websites that link to any old URLs and provide them with the new URLs, requesting that they update their links accordingly. This benefits their website as well, helping to keep their content up to date for their users.
8. Test Site Functionality
Check for Issues: Ensure the new site is free of technical issues. These can include broken links, as described above, but also slow load times, mobile usability issues, failing accessibility checks and website best practices. Most of the basics can be tested in Google’s free tool; PageSpeed Insights. Test your home page and at least one example of every page ‘type’, checking both the Desktop and the Mobile version of each page via the tabs at the top of the report.
9. Optimise for SEO
All your technical SEO basics must be up to scratch. Make sure your on-page SEO elements (such as meta titles and descriptions, headings, alt tags, internal links etc) are in place on the new site.
Once you have tested the technical SEO aspects in Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool (i.e. site speed, accessibility, best practices and a selection of SEO checks), you’ll need to work through the recommendations and action all points that are feasible for your particular website build.
You should also test your structured data and your secure (https) protocol for all content, (any page element being loaded from an insecure ‘http’ address will cause a ‘mixed content’ warning to be flagged to the left your the browser address bar).
10. Keep Monitoring
As progress is made, keep testing your pages in the various tools to ensure your scores are going in the right direction. Keep an eye on the reports on Google Search Console and react to any new issues as soon as they arise. We also recommend all website owners to download the free version of Screaming Frog, a website crawler tool that allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs (plenty for most small-medium sites). You can then get a real-time report of many of the points we’ve covered in this guide, rather than waiting for Google to index pages, clear its caches and update its reports.
By following these steps, you can significantly reduce the risk of losing your search engine ranking and ensure a smooth transition during your website relaunch.
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