Is it a perfect time for you to change the look of your website to a shiny new design? But what happen if you start loosing traffic to your site? With the evolving technology, your site design seems to become old in a year or two and when you change the design of your website, you may experience a huge drop in traffic. Today we are going to learn tips to fix SEO traffic drop after you do a website redesign completely. These tips will help you optimize and fix SEO.
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How to Fix SEO Traffic Drop After Website Redesign
Here are some points that you need to know what causes drop in traffic for your new sparkling site, how you can handle the loss and how to fix SEO traffic drop after a website redsign.
Causes and Solutions to traffic drops for a newly designed website:
If you have redesigned you website and analytics start showing a drop in traffic. You should not panic in this case as it is very common phenomena a redesigned website experiences, Google bots will again crawl all your pages and index them along with the new version of your website to your users.
If it’s been more days for a continuous traffic drop, then it is definitely a thing of worry and its more horrific if you have done a website redesign. But still there are fixes available, which you can take to fix SEO traffic drops and boost your site’s organic traffic.
1. Outdated Sitemap:
When Google crawls your site pages, Sitemap is one of the important factors which help Google in crawling all your website pages and index them. Sitemap contains list of all important pages on your website and you can submit it to search console to speed up the crawling and indexing process and restore the traffic levels.
When you do a website redesign the sitemap also changes and if you have not updated the sitemap for your redesigned website, Google won’t be able to properly crawl all the pages and this eventually leads to traffic drops.
Solution:
Always create a new Sitemap before launching your newly designed website. Sitemap should contain all the important pages. Generally a sitemap should have a maximum of 100 pages. If your website is huge and you have more than 100 pages than crawlers will consider a general overview rather than complete listing.
This is one of the main things to look while you fix SEO and traffic drop after you have done a website redesign.
2. Improper Redirects:
Redirects play a very important role and if they are not set correctly after a website redesign, it cause traffic drop, unless you keep all the URL’s same. When Google starts to crawl your new designed pages , redirects tells the search engine and browser where the new version of pages are located, without that Google will think the page is not present and won’t be able to crawl.
You can check the pages without redirects by logging into Google’s Search console -> go to crawl->Crawl Errors-> Select “Not Found” tab.
Google webmasters tools can be accessed here ->
Solution:
Setting up 301 redirects will help you to fix this problem.
If URL’s of your site has changed, you will need to setup new URL’s before launching the website. By making all the URL’s as 301 Redirect will tell search engine bots that the old URL’s have been moved to a new URL.
If you have not set 301 Redirect than search engine crawler will go to the old URL and will abandon trying to index that page which will lead to drop in traffic.
3. Changed Content:
Some times when you do a website redesign or revamp, you may even end up changing content of pages on your website. Search engines like freshly written content and according to your content your pages are ranked.
But suppose that you forgot which content and key words were bringing traffic to your site and you might eliminate priority keywords for which you were ranked. This leads to a traffic drop. One should consider all the keywords and pages which were bringing most of the traffic to the site before changing any content. This will fix SEO on a keyword level and also take care of traffic drop in organic searches.
Solution:
Make SEO an integral part. A proper SEO technique should be used to make any changes to your website. SEO expertise should be consulted every time, so that they can advise on how traffic and ranking can be increased. Content should be fresh and engaging. Contact us to get help on SEO and all the things related to ranking.
4. Robots.txt File is Blocked:
Robots.txt is a file which tells search engines which pages they should index and which one they should not. Disable the indexing by search engines until all the pages are developed completely when you are in the process of redesigning your website and you work is still in progress.
Sometimes you forget to update the Robots.txt file after your site goes live, which continue to restrict search engine bots for indexing.
Solution:
Always update the Robots.txt file on the server before launching your site. You can check your site’s Robots.txt file by opening a browser-> In the address bar enter your domain followed by /robots.txt. This will open robots file. Now you can check what all pages are allowed for indexing and which ones are made disabled.
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So these tips will help you fix SEO traffic drop after your have had a website redesign. Please let us know if you have something to add in this list.