Eventually, you need to redesign your website, especially if the competition has performed major facelift to their designs. If you refuse to perform immediate redesign, you could actually become an obsolete creature in the industry. Website redesign project, is much more than just changing the visual appeal of your website, you may also need to perform coding and structural modifications as well. A major redesign project may involve migrating your website to a CMS platform. However, there are numerous SEO consequences of making such a change. There could be SEO implications of changing the core of your website. You may still use the same domain name, but the internal URL structure may change completely.
On websites with older PHP-based platform, the URL format may appear random, with different combinations of letters, symbols and numbers. CMS has more structured URL format, often with only the webpage titles as the URL name, behind the domain name. In order to fix this issue, you need to perform 301 redirect, which not only redirect the URL, but the SEO juice as well. It means that old webpages with new URL structure won’t lose their SEO benefits. However, you may need to perform this task manually and if there are already hundreds of webpages in your old websites, you may need to allocate a few days of work to configure the 301 redirect properly. After migrating to a CMS format, you should use the new URL format in your future linkbuilding projects.
Website redesign also involves changes in site architecture. It may be needed if you discover various inefficiencies that need to be remedied. The overall website infrastructure will need to be changed and we should consider various key elements as well. As an example, your website may have inefficient structure that needs to be changed. Some components of the website may also need to featured more or less prominently depending on the requirements. Finding out the most successful webpages of your website should be quite easy, you may use analytic tools to find out websites with the highest traffic. It means that you need to showcase these webpages better to further improve their traffic potentials and they may get more traffic as a result.
Website redesign may also include content optimization. After a few years, you may find out that specific keywords have fallen out of favour in the industry and new keywords have more significant trends. Your keywords usages may also be inefficient and you need to better improve the overall placements. Keywords can’t be overused, so you need put them strategically all over your content and websites. However, you should be careful about changing the content, because there are some keyphrases or paragraphs that become the entry ways to your website through search engines. Removing them may cause you to lose some traffic. Analytic tools should allow you to determine what keyphrases that people use to enter your website. In fact, you may use the same keyphrases to create another article to further use their potentials.