3 SEO Factors to Consider While Redesigning B2b Website
The overall marketing strategy of a B2B business is based on it website. A professional, user-friendly, easily navigable website, with strategically located ‘call to action’ elements and content that addresses different requirements, appeals to site’s visitors. Additionally, a website also needs to be relevant and updated from time to time, to keep pace with the latest trends. Since websites are constantly evaluated for their looks and recentness, they may need re-designing some times.
SEO initiatives are aimed at garnering the trust of search engines over a period of time.Therefore implementing SEO, when re-designing websites may seem like starting fresh all over again. Here are some useful hints to keep in mind and help you retain as much control of SEO during the process.
Re-implementing SEO on a re-designed site can be very daunting.Metatitles, descriptions, keywords, content etc., all need to be reviewed and changed if required. Furthermore, re-designing often implies new URLs, which in turn affects links that that inbound to the site.
However tedious it may seem, the best approach is to take up the challenge with enthusiasm. Using some tried and tested tips will also make the task much easier and help you retain maximum SEO for your redesigned site.
Implement 301 redirects
301 redirects enable search engines to know that the old web pages are now extinct and that they have now been permanently relocated to a new URL. Thus they are very important. 301 redirects offer you a way to uphold the same trust levels, including age and links, which the search engines had with your old pages. The re-designed pages are considered as new if a 301 redirect is not implemented on it, resulting in reduced credibility with the search engines.
Safeguard the test site with passwords
The team working on the re-design simultaneously works on a tests site, even as the old site is up and running. When re-designing your site, you obviously wouldn’t want both the old and new versions of your website to feature on search engine results together. Therefore take care to password-protect your test site so that it’s not possible to index and rank it.
Broken links should be fixed
Search engines follow links as they crawl the web and evaluate your website’s importance and relevance. Broken links lead to loss of trust and reputation that has been fostered over a period of time and can erode the overall value of your website. Therefore locating broken links during the re-design process and them immediately sorting them is very vital to maintain the SEO levels of the new website.
To conclude, every business needs to evolve and keep pace with the latest industry trends. This approach is key to survival and growth. B2B websites, by nature of their business, discerning audiences and steep competition levels, have to be more geared to embrace the changes probably a little more often than the other websites. A checklist of ‘to dos’ make the process easier.
Tags: seo
