Website relaunch
Definition
A website relaunch is the process of updating or redesigning an existing website with the aim of improving its functionality, design, and/or overall user experience. This can include updating the website's content, restructuring its information architecture, and/or implementing new features and technologies.
Factors to consider when relaunching a site
When relaunching a website, there are a few key factors to consider:
- Goals: Define what you hope to achieve with the relaunch, whether it's to improve website's performance, increase conversions, or improve user experience.
- Audience: Research your target audience and their needs, this can help to make sure that the new website is tailored to meet their requirements and expectations.
- Content: Review your current website's content and identify any areas that need to be updated or restructured. Make sure that all of your content is accurate, up-to-date and useful to your audience.
- Design: Consider the overall design of your website and determine whether it needs to be updated to be more modern, user-friendly, and visually appealing.
- Functionality: Review your website's functionality and identify any areas that need to be improved. Consider adding new features such as social media integration, e-commerce functionality, or a responsive design.
- SEO: Before launching your new website, make sure that it is optimized for search engines, and that all of your old URLs are properly redirected to the new ones, to avoid loss of traffic or ranking.
- Testing: Before launching the new website, it's important to thoroughly test it to ensure that it is fully functional and free of bugs. Make sure that all of the links are working and that the website is responsive on different devices and web browsers.
- Promotion: Once the website is live, promote it through your social media channels, email marketing campaigns, and other marketing efforts.
How to make it SEO-friendly
When relaunching a website, there are a few key considerations to keep in mind to ensure that your SEO efforts are not affected negatively:
URL structure
One of the most important things to consider when relaunching a website is to maintain the same URL structure as much as possible. This will minimize the risk of any broken links and ensure that any links pointing to your website will still work. If it's not possible to maintain the same URL structure, then it's important to redirect the old URLs to the new ones with 301 redirects.
Content
When updating your website's content, it's important to keep in mind that search engines take into account the content of your website to determine its relevance and authority. Make sure that the new content is of high quality and relevant to your target audience, and that it is optimized for the keywords you want to rank for.
Meta tags
The meta tags, such as title tags and meta descriptions, are important for SEO and should be updated and optimized for each new page.
Sitemap and robots.txt
These two files are very important for SEO, as they help search engines to understand the structure of your website and which pages to crawl. Make sure to update them accordingly and submit them to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and other search engines.
Duplicate Content
Ensure that your website does not have any duplicate content, it will negatively impact your SEO ranking.
Link building
Make sure to keep track of all the backlinks pointing to your old website, reach out to the website owners and request that they update their links to point to the new website.
Site Speed
Make sure that the new website is optimized for speed, it will positively impact SEO and user experience.
By keeping these factors in mind and taking the necessary steps to address them, you can minimize the risk of negatively impacting your SEO efforts during a website relaunch, and put your website in the best position to succeed.