Redesigning your website? Don’t make these SEO mistakes [Infographic]

If you’re considering or currently undergoing a website redesign, I’m sure you come to learn what a big project revamping your brand’s digital space can be.

From creating modern, fresh page designs to mapping out user flows and page strategies to rewriting copy, there’s a lot to consider to ensure your site not only looks great and is engaging, but also improves the user experience and increases conversions.

A successful redesign, however, goes beyond revamped designs and updated content. 
There are other components to consider that are invaluable to a new website’s success. This includes components that aren’t so obvious on the front-end, or rather components that don’t always meet the visitor’s eye.

For example, what back-end elements do you need to tackle to help ensure visitors find your new site in the first place?

S 👏 E 👏O👏

Search engine optimization, or SEO, plays a big part in the success of your website, new or not.

While SEO should be a component of every redesign, it’s important to remember that it shouldn’t coincide ONLY with a full redesign.

SEO work should be a long-term, ongoing process to maintain or improve rankings.

And, yes, while important, it encompasses more than keyword research or writing keyword-centric copy.

Technical and on-page SEO include several tasks brands can do on the back-end of their website to help search engines better access, crawl, understand, and ultimately index their site.

When we’re talking about technical and on-page SEO, think URL structures, content that appears in SERPs like meta and title tags, page speed, and redirects to name a few.

When done correctly and consistently, SEO can amplify a website’s success, but according to research from earlier this year, many brands continue to make mistakes and miss the mark and successful website SEO optimization.

Sitechecker used its very own audit tool to check the SEO on six million pages and identified repeat offenses in three SEO categories.

Guess what took up two of those categories? Yup, technical and on-page SEO.

Fortunately, the team at Sitechecker mapped out the most common issues identified in their research and presented their findings in this cool infographic to help brands become more aware of what to look out for when they tackle SEO, technical or not.

The most common mistakes according to Sitechecker’s research include:

• Mixed content: This refers to internal linking on a site where a secure server, https, links to insecure content, something hosted on an http. Some browsers may block this which can decrease your site's authority and security.
• Meta tags: These back-end content snippets appear on SERPs, and tell important information about a page. Each page on your site should have a unique, keyword-focused meta description under 150 characters. Google does not like when sites have duplicate, nonexistent, too short, or too long meta descriptions.
• Redirects: These are very important for rebuilds or sitemap updates. 301 redirects are used when a page has been removed or unpublished to make sure the user journey isn’t broken. Without redirects, Google may not be able to fully crawl your site or visitors may run into 404 pages. Too many of these response codes can signal to Google that the site isn’t of high quality.
• Indexing: If your page isn’t indexed, then your page won’t appear in search engines. Make sure all your essential pages are set up to be indexed and listed as you desire.

Check out the full infographic from Sitechecker below: