How to Update Your Website While Avoiding A New York SEO Disaster
If your competitor has a great website, but yours doesn’t look so good and the content on your site is out of date, then it’s important that you plan carefully. The site that you have right now has built up a lot of SEO equity, and the strategies that you used to make that site are still valid strategies. You could be risking losing everything if you update your site without a good plan in mind first. Having a good content strategy will help you to get the most out of the update, and turn a site that is performing OK into one that is performing even better.
Five Tips to Help You Avoid SEO Disasters
Develop a Plan
Develop an SEO plan before you do anything else. This plan should include everything from your site’s content, to its architecture and the way that it will be seen by Google. Aim to ensure that the new site will rank even better than your current one.
Use a Crawler
Tools such as Screaming Frog and SEO Spider Tool can help you to get accurate data on each URL that your site currently has. The report that they will provide will give you some vital information on what you need to build, and any problems that you need to fix, such as:
- Broken links
- Duplicate or missing page titles
- Duplicate or missing metadata
- Duplicate content
Run a Full Rank Report
Use a rank checking tool to compare how your site performs with regard to specific keywords. The rank report should help you to observe which keywords and phrases rank best, and which you will need to work on so that you can improve your overall rankings.
Use Your Current Site’s Data
Thoroughly analyze the ranking and crawl reports for your current site. Analyze the strategies that you have been using and figure out why some pages are ranking better than others. Address the issues that are detailed in the crawler report, and make sure you fix them so they don’t carry over to your new site.
Take Advantage of 301 Redirects
If you remove a page during your update, it will not automatically disappear from Google, and other webmasters may still be linking to it. You can use a 301 redirect to ensure that people get redirected to something useful instead of a broken link. You will still lose some equity, but the redirect will pass around 90 percent of its ranking power to the page that it points to, and that can be a nice bonus.
If you don’t think that you have the time or enough expertise to do a good job of a site update, then consider hiring an experienced SEO professional to help you.
Call or contact us today for your free consultation. Visit our blog for more insight on new SEO strategies in New York.
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