8 Helpful SEO Tools for your Website Redesign

You’ve probably realized by now that a website redesign includes many components. Your website needs to function well, give users an outstanding experience that invites them back, and when the day is done, solidify a sale (whether that be for service or product).

During the reconstruction process of your website, you’ve probably uncovered several major mistakes to avoid – in fact, if you haven’t already browsed this list of potential mistakes, you may want to check that out first. We want to share some helpful SEO tools for your website redesign that have helped us avoid these mistakes. We’ve personally experienced the benefits of many of these tools; they’ve worked for us, so they might work for you too!

1. Think of SEO From the Start

When you first begin creating content for your revamped website, remember to implant keywords into as many headings as possible (the title, H1, H2, etc.), the meta description, alt tags for all images, and of course, the written content of the website. However, a tricky thing to remember is to keep the content human-like; if you “stuff” the site full of keywords, Google will see that you’re trying too hard. The goal is to implant the keyword enough so that Google recognizes your site as an authority, but not so much that a visitor who is ignorant of SEO can tell that you’ve done so.

What SEO tools can help you analyze how well you’ve optimized your webpage content? Try downloading Moz SEO Toolbar. It’s free and easy to use if you don’t have access to other keyword optimization sites, specifically paid platforms. We also use Yoast SEO, a plugin from WordPress, and WebCEO, which is a paid platform.

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2. Audit your Existing Site

Even though you’re in the process of redesigning your website, some aspects of your current site might actually be working quite well. You’ll want to monitor what is going right in order to maintain that positive aspect of your site.

What SEO tools can help you track the number of inbound linking domains? Check out Open Site Explorer from Moz.com. It not only delivers results, but it’s also free and user-friendly. Majestic SEO tools is designed for Excel, and all you need to do is set up a free account. You’ll notice that these sites can also help with a slew of other SEO stuff.

When we track the number of visits, visitors, and pages that receive the most traffic, we most often use Google Analytics. Google Analytics is completely free and can be extremely helpful when you know what you’re doing. However, we’ll warn you that it can be overwhelming and difficult to understand when you first start using it.

Last, don’t underestimate yourself! Use your unique powers of human observation to go through your own site with meticulous, time-consuming attention to detail. See for yourself what needs to be done for your new site.

3. Include Highly Searched Keywords

How can you find keywords that your audience actually uses? We’ve found Google Keyword Planner to be an awesome source. Although it can be complicated to understand and use to its full potential, it’s free! It will tell you the bid competition for certain words, filter out searches that don’t get much traffic, create long-tail and short-tail versions of the same keyword, and notify you if a certain word is losing or gaining popularity. We swear by it!

Another useful tool is Google Trends, which tells you what’s currently being searched for the most. Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends work hand-in-hand; Keyword Planner is built specifically for bidding on keywords, but it doesn’t tell you which keywords are most popular, and that’s where Google Trends can help.

4. Set up 301 Redirects

If you’ve read our ebook, “10 SEO Mistakes to Avoid During your Next Website Redesign,” then you know how important 301 Redirects are when redesigning your website. How can you ensure each current webpage gets a place on the new site? Ask your web developers if these words mean anything to them:

    • htaccess
    • Mod_rewrite
    • ISAPI_Rewrite

These are just options – there are others tools that developers can use for Redirects. The one you choose will need to be incorporated in the beginning, when you’re mapping out the structure of your new site.

seo tools for your website redesign

404 Error Page Not Found

Don’t forget to Analyze URLs! If you don’t set up 310 Redirects, visitors to your new site might receive a 404 Error Page if the URL doesn’t lead anywhere. How can you solve an HTTP 404 “Page Not Found” Error? If you’re getting a 404 because the page doesn’t exist, you need to create a page on the new website with the corresponding URL on the new site. Another option is to redirect the URL to a different page on the new site (in case you’ve consolidated two webpages from the old site into one on the new).

What tools can help you monitor URLs to prevent 404s? We use Screaming Frog the most; it can be downloaded for free or you can pay for additional features. We sometimes use WebCEO, a paid platform that keeps everything in one place.

5. Eliminate Low-Quality Backlinks

Perhaps you bought backlinks way back in the day and they’re now causing your site to drop in ranked search results. You may be wondering how you can control off-website links that direct traffic to your site. Using a tool like Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) will help you disavow all spammy domains. With this tool you can tell Google to disavow spammy links entirely, but maintain the high quality links that promote positive ranking for your site. Get rid of the bad, keep the good.

6. Implement Responsive Design

We don’t recommend using mobile-only sites or dynamic serving. Responsive design, controlled by CSS, reconfigures the style of each webpage to correspond with the device on which it’s being viewed. WordPress, our preferred website design platform, is a content management system that makes it easy to manage responsive content.

In addition, you also need to optimize your new site for faster load times. Page load speeds apply to the website as a whole but are especially critical for mobile users. If mobile pages don’t load under approximately 3 seconds, you could lose significant traffic. We use a tool called Google Pagespeed Insights/Tools to analyze how fast each webpage loads, but GTMetrix, Pingdom, and Webpagetest all do the same thing. They’re easy-to-use platforms that not only help you monitor your page speed but also keep you on the look-out for potential improvement.

7. A Note About Noindex

Another important note to remember about SEO during your website redesign is that search engines can see you working on your development website (you are developing on a separate server, right?). Don’t ever “noindex” you main website or homepage because Google will then literally forget about your site, but you should definitely do this on your dev site.

To make sure that Google doesn’t flag your dev site as “broken,” you should set up “noindex” during development. Noindexing your dev site at the beginning of your website redesign is just as important as undoing it before launching the new site. How can you check to see if Google is indexing your site or not?

If you’re using WordPress, simply check the noindex box that says, “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” to see if it’s been marked or not.

If your CMS doesn’t have a noindex box to check, simply add the code User-agent: * Disallow: / to the robots.txt file or add the meta tag <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> to the the head section of your website during the designing phase. To undo it after you’ve launched your new site, simply remove this code from the robots.txt file and/or the header section of your site.

8. Add Analytics Tracking to the New Site

Google Analytics is a great tool to keep a tab on incoming traffic, bounce rate, how long a website visitor stays on any given page, that kind of thing. Any time you try something new, such as, oh, launch a new website redesign, Google Analytics offers a way to measure what’s effective and what isn’t.

If you’d like to learn more about analytics and measuring your marketing campaign, check out the 6 Marketing Metrics Your Boss Actually Cares About.

We hope these simple SEO tools remove any anxiety about your website redesign. If you avoid the common mistakes mentioned here and pay attention to the nitty-gritty details of your site, you’ll avoid any heartache after you launch your new site.

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