Successfully Relaunch Your Website: An SEO Checklist

[vc_row us_bg_video="0"][vc_column][vc_column_text]For all companies that have been active online for several years, a relaunch is inevitable at some point. Design requirements change, surfing habits are no longer the same in 2014 as they were 5 or 10 years ago, companies undergo rebranding, the site is restructured for usability or SEO reasons, a responsive design is implemented... The reasons are manifold.

[/vc_column_text][us_btn text="SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER NOW" align="center" link="url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.internetwarriors.de%2Fwissen%2Fnewsletter-abonnieren%2F|||" el_class="cta_button_blog"][vc_empty_space height="20px"][vc_column_text]Every relaunch offers companies the opportunity to optimize the site, make it more user-friendly and search engine-friendly, and ultimately become more successful. Likewise, redesigning a site also poses a risk that should not be underestimated. For businesses dependent on online operations, the loss of visibility and drop in traffic can have devastating consequences.

To dispel the fear of the specter of relaunches, we provide you with practical tips for a drama-free relaunch and answer the question: When is a relaunch truly successful?

What are the dangers of relaunches?

The first question when evaluating an upcoming relaunch is: What type of relaunch is it? If it's a pure redesign where URL structure, file names, and paths to files/images remain the same and only the design changes, there are usually no significant impacts on the ranking to fear.

However, if a technical relaunch is planned, involving domain changes, moving to a new host, a new server, restructuring the site, or switching to a different shop or content management system, the consequences can be severe and result in a massive loss of visibility in search engines. For example, if URLs change, or elements like title tags, descriptions, headlines, internal linking, or canonicals are not correctly adopted, it can significantly worsen the site's rankings or cause users to be directed to error pages in large numbers and leave.

Another issue: If URLs change extensively or even the domain name is changed, all previously active or passive acquired backlinks will point to old, non-existent pages and lose their effectiveness if no redirects are set up.

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Checklist: What to consider from an SEO perspective

In general, during any relaunch, SEO experts, programmers, and designers should work closely together to consider all criteria and find a solution that is technically feasible, user-friendly, and search engine-friendly. Specifically, attention should be paid to the following points:

• Avoid creating duplicate content: The dev server should not be indexable by Google. All test versions of the site should not be present in the search engine index.

• Ensure crawlability of the new site: On the live server, it's important to ensure that the site can be crawled and that the bot is not blocked by a forgotten “noindex”.

• Review new technology for performance and SEO suitability: Can all content be indexed, nothing hidden behind JavaScript or Ajax, are text contents readable, is navigation visible and operable by the Googlebot, does the implementation of new multimedia content slow down the site? How is the new site’s mobile performance?

• Update the robots.txt file: Directories that Google should not crawl need to be adjusted to the new website's URL structure.

• Question URL structure: The old URL structure should be maintained as far as possible (if it is search engine friendly).

• Correctly redirect old URLs: 301 redirects (not 302!) to new URLs should be set up.

• Avoid duplicate content in URL design: Is it ensured in the new URL design that no automatic duplicate content is generated? (Keyword: trailing slashes or URLs with and without www, URLs with and without html, etc.)

• Check the sitemap: Is the sitemap up to date and only includes the new pages, is it complete, are all URLs that should be indexed listed?

• Update links: If the domain name changes, the links in all social profiles and directories should be changed to the new domain, provided entries can be edited.

• Review internal links: If URLs change, hard links need to be adjusted to avoid leading to an error page and wasting potential.

• Review file names and alt attributes: Are the (hopefully descriptive) file names carried over, or rewritten by the system? Do alt attributes remain?

• Review structured data: If structured data was used before, do they still work?

• Check tracking: Do Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, conversion, and eCommerce tracking still work on the new site? If there were author links, do they still function?

Evaluation: How do you recognize a successful relaunch?

After the relaunch, it's useful to monitor changes in Analytics. It is also helpful to note the relaunch date to better correlate later changes. An SEO audit should be conducted beforehand, upon which the collected figures can later be checked.

Important: Even with a relaunch considering all the above points, it cannot be ruled out that rankings and traffic may temporarily decline. In the case of a successful relaunch, these numbers recover quickly, resulting in only minimal losses, or ideally, a long-term increase in access numbers.

An overview of values that are useful to monitor:

• Keywords triggering impressions and clicks

• Page views

• Bounce rate

• Time spent

• Pages/visit

• Conversions

• Other eCommerce KPIs

• Number of indexed pages and images

• Website load time

A relaunch can be considered successful if there is no significant drop in traffic. If access and other important KPIs (see above) remain constant or even improve, this is deemed a success.[/vc_column_text][us_btn text="SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER NOW" align="center" link="url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.internetwarriors.de%2Fwissen%2Fnewsletter-abonnieren%2F|||" el_class="cta_button_blog"][vc_empty_space height="20px"][vc_column_text]

May we assist you with your relaunch?

Are you planning a relaunch and seeking professional support? We are happy to assist you, from developing a new concept to accompanying the relaunch and evaluation. Get a personalized, non-binding offer![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]