Your webpage’s SEO is an ongoing task that is really never done. There is always room for improvement and tweaks to make to better optimize your content and overall website. So, when is the best time to start working on SEO for your new or existing website?
The answer, although frustrating, is yesterday. While it’s not too late to get started now, the best time to start optimizing your website is as soon as you decide to create it. Check out some of our best tips below for implementing SEO on both redesigns and brand-new websites.
Redesigning an Existing Website
One of the scariest things that can happen to a business that depends on search engine traffic is to have a redesign plummet your website within the search engine ranking. This can happen for a variety of reasons, so it is important that you are thinking about SEO from day one of your redesign.
One major SEO error that we have seen during a redesign is forgetting to redirect URLs. If you have an existing site with ranked pages and you don’t tell the search engines where that content has moved to, your content will quickly drop off the rankings, and traffic to your site will plummet. Make sure you have a 301 redirect plan in place when launching a redesign for your website.
There are many other ways that a redesign could negatively impact a webpage’s SEO so if you have a page that is ranking particularly well, it is important to understand what is causing this, so you don’t accidentally change or remove any of these elements. A good practice is to complete an SEO audit of your existing website before beginning a redesign. This will help identify areas where your SEO is performing well so you can maintain these aspects during the redesign.
Launching a New Website
SEO might seem like the last thing you want to worry about as you’re setting up a new website or getting a business off the ground. Many people are simply focused on getting the website functioning so they can get it out into the world. Unfortunately, rushing to launch a new website without considering SEO can have negative impacts in the long run.
Ideally, SEO work should be integrated with your user experience (UX) designs. Many times, clients will design a full website and then take it to their SEO team to optimize. You will save time and money by working on the two concurrently as the UX will not need to be redesigned at all to compensate for SEO.
Along with the timing above, it is helpful if your UX team and designers are familiar with SEO principles and best practices and your SEO team can understand UX and design. These two groups need to work very closely and being able to understand each other’s goals and basic strategies will help them work more effectively together.
As mentioned at the start of this article, SEO is an ongoing process that is never completed. There is always room for further optimization and should be worked on regularly, even if you do spend the time to set yourself up properly upon launching your new site so make sure SEO audits and updates are a part of your regular processes.
Contact Capstone Today!
SEO can be intimidating at times, especially if you are approaching it for the first time. If you already have a website and haven’t spent time working SEO, fear not. It’s not too late to contact our team at Capstone Digital Marketing to discuss the ways we can help improve SEO for your website.
