Established in 2005, Vizion is one of the oldest SEO agencies with experience in providing redesign consulting and guidance in a variety of verticals and industries. We have experience with manufacturing, healthcare, entertainment, B2B, retail/ecommerce and many others. Our team of experts will set you on the path for success with valuable business insights and SEO recommendations to ensure your site launch will be effective for years to come.
We’ve broken down the most common ways that Vizion can help with a site redesign:
Our SEO Redesign Consulting Process
Onboard
We will need understand your business and marketing goals and what you wish to accomplish when redesigning your website. This will help us make an effective plan for the site architecture and content needed to support the customer journey and your goals.
Platform and CMS Review
Sometimes a redesign is needed to move to new technology or take advance of features that aren’t available in the existing platform. We can help you evaluate the new platform options and provide recommendations on the SEO items that are critical to have so when the new site launches you can avoid SEO problems.
Whether your site is using WordPress, Magento, Shopify, Acquia, or a custom-built platform in Angular JS, we can help you avoid the pitfalls and ensure the new site is a success.
Hosting Platform Review
While your system administrators will manage the server set up and hosting, we can provide insights into certain issues that could impact site performance and avoid SEO issues. We usually recommend having 4 sites as part of a redesign:
Development Site: The working site where developers and designers are actively developing and working things out
Staging Site: Used for QA/UAT and approvals prior to launch
Production Site: The live production server that’s available for the public and crawlers
Backup/Old Site: A backup site that can be used to store old content for reference, or in the worst case scenario, to revert the site launch if there are some major issues.
Not all companies will want all four, we commonly see just Staging, Production, and Old site, as oftentimes the development is done on an internal server that’s not externally accessible, or on localhosts.
Other 3rd Party Integrations
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) can improve page speed by hosting media and resources (typically JavaScript, CSS, images, and video files) at the last mile to avoid network latency, bandwidth and source server load. They often provide some controls and options to fine tune the configuration, and some can automatically optimize and serve the appropriate images for mobile devices. We recommend using a CDN where possible as there are noticeable page speed improvements, especially for media-heavy sites.
Other 3rd party systems to consider may be applications that deliver data, charts, contact forms, or other content. If this needs to be available for the public and not behind a paywall, then how the content is fetched and delivered can impact crawling and your ability to rank for keywords contained within that content. We can evaluate how the integrations can impact search visibility and work with you to implement the appropriate solution.
Migration of Content from Other Sites
We’ve worked with clients who acquired another company and wish to merge multiple sites. We help by mapping out the sites and recommending how the content all fits into the new site. If you have plans to migrate other sites in future, we will be able to recommend a site architecture that is extensible and allows for future expansion.
Major Content Changes
If your site redesign includes major content changes, we can help recommend the new site structure, identify the internal links that need to be updated and put together a redirect map to maintain SEO visibility and organic traffic. These are also especially important to maintain the benefit of external links pointing to your site, not only from an SEO perspective, but you don’t want users to follow a link to your site and get a 404/page not found error.
The redirect map we provide will typically be in spreadsheet format so it can easily be imported into your CMS.
Rebranding
When doing a rebrand, we can assist with the supporting items that aren’t typically the primary focus of the site launch. For example, we can support you by:
Finding pages that mention the old brand
Finding external links that link to the old brand and perform outreach to help with the rebrand process
Recommend content that helps users understand the new brand
Provide updated schema markup with the new brand
Update your Google Business Profile listing
Update other directories with the new branding
Information Architecture
Your site architecture is critically important to the long-term success of your site. We want to make sure we set you up for future success by recommending the order and structure of content on your site that allows for future expansion of your products & services, supporting mid- and top of funnel content and other supporting content such as a knowledge base or technical support.
Competitive Analysis
We will ask for your top competitors, which are usually your business competitors, but from our SEO tools, we will also discover your search competitors. We will look to find their high-ranking content and identify gaps in the content on your site. We will provide an audit document highlighting their success and recommendations on how to catch up to and beat them.
KW Research and Taxonomy
We use our tools and your existing analytics to understand the important pages on your sites, what they rank for and what changes we need to make. Our recommendations will be used to influence:
URL structure
Menu labels
Category and subcategory names
Product and service names
Metadata
Internal anchor text
Calls to Action (CTAs)
Schema markup adjustments
Content Planning
Taking the previous research into consideration we will identify the content sections that need to be created or further enhanced. In some cases that may be expanding the geo/localization of content, or it might be creating content about supporting topics that assist the customer journey. We provide a list of content recommendations in spreadsheet format and craft content outlines/briefs for writers to generate new content.
Technical SEO Recommendations
This step is especially important for site redesigns that are moving to a new CMS or technology stack. There are many issues that can impact the ability of search engines to discover and index the content on your site. Our technical SEO audit reviews over 100 different factors as well as a page speed review of the different templates used on the site. We will provide a prioritized list of observations and recommendations for your developers to use.
Link Audit Pre-launch QA
On the staging server we will conduct an audit to ensure that our SEO recommendations have been implemented correctly and that there are no technical SEO issues that could impact the site once it launches. We understand that sometimes you’re up against an immovable deadline, so we will work together to identify and prioritize the critical items needed for launch, and which items can be a fast follow, after launch.
Site Launch Support
When the new site launches, we want to be sure that the search engines are able to discover and properly index the new site. Launch activities may include items such as:
Getting a new domain registered and verified in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tool
Notifying search engines of a change of address
Updating XML sitemap files
Updating Google Business Profiles/Knowledge Panels of the new site/brand
Updating important directories and external link sources
Post-launch QA
In our experience, as much as we want the staging server to be as close possible to the final production environment, there are invariably small differences that cannot be avoided, especially for sites that have 3rd party integrations. Our post launch QA will go through all the major SEO issues that could impact search engines’ ability to find and discover the new content, as well as validate that events and conversions are being tracked and measured correctly. We keep a list of outstanding items and work with you and your development team to prioritize and get them implemented.
Ongoing SEO Support
After the new site is live clients tell us they’re appreciative of all the insights and guidance that we provided and want to retain us for ongoing SEO Services. Usually, there’s a backlog of lower priority technical SEO items and new content that needs to be published, so we can follow on from the site launch and make the next 12 months a big success.
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FAQs
Does a Website Redesign Affect SEO?
Yes, often, the goal in redesigning a website is to increase the quality of the content and increase organic traffic for your target audiences who are searching the web for the products and services you provide. We take a careful look at your unique place in the industry and customize our services for your continued success as your needs change. Our team can help you select a content management system and implement a search-friendly information architecture to allow for organization and prioritization of content and its effectiveness in search. If you are looking at migrating to a new platform, we can also advise you through the process and set up a measurement strategy to assess results.
How Do I Maintain SEO Rankings for Site Redesign?
If you are content with your current SEO rankings but are interested in redesign, it can be intimidating to risk sacrificing your success. Have no fear - our professional team at Vizion will use an understanding of what is currently providing some success to capitalize on your strengths and continue that success. Our team can identify common issues that inhibit a successful redesign project and help you avoid any pitfalls that affect the performance of your site. It is imperative that we help you preserve existing rankings and traffic you have obtained while at the same time striving to make improvements.
How Do I Redesign a Website without Losing SEO?
The best way to optimize usability, have striking and attractive structures, and integrate SEO best practices is to balance these components together from the very beginning of the redesign process. Vizion’s SEO Professionals are experts in organizing the performance elements of your website before making decisions about its appearance. We are then able to work in an integrated way with the web design team to ensure your audience is being met with content that suits them and encourages them to choose your business for their needs.
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“Our old site was content rich but poorly organized and extremely difficult to manage. Since our new website launched, we’ve seen months with a more than 400% year over year leap in organic traffic. We can now accurately track conversions and ROI, manage the site, and have proven a strong return for our investment on the project. The numbers speak for themselves. Such a dedicated team is hard to come by. Vizion went the extra mile to ensure we met crucial time lines for launch, working around the clock when necessary. We would not hesitate to recommend this company.”
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Rob Haines Marketing Manager | Service Experts
