Maintaining SEO When Updating Your Website

What Is SEO Preservation?
The term “SEO Preservation” can refer to a variety of different actions and strategies designed to maintain a site’s search engine ranking during and after a redesign or upgrade. Because so many SEO strategies rely on behind-the-scenes management of the internal structure of a website, changing your site’s infrastructure can wreak havoc on your SEO if comprehensive preparations aren’t made. Updating a website often results in a wide variety of changes that can have a dramatic negative effect on a site’s SEO:
- Removed and/or new content
- Different page URLs
- Missing or duplicate tags
- Broken links
- Changes to the site’s hierarchy
- Protocol issues
SEO Preservation can ensure changes to your website don’t hurt your search ranking. A good strategy can even leverage aspects of the new site to increase visibility and traffic. Some common aspects of SEO Preservation may include auditing your existing site, crawling your new test site, and analyzing the data to determine how different elements are affecting the SEO.
Why Do You Need SEO Preservation?
Effective SEO isn’t a one-time project. Ensuring your site performs well on an ongoing basis requires techniques that constantly adapt to meet changing search engine algorithms and online market conditions.
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Updating your site consistently?can ensure your content remains interesting and engaging, which in and of itself can be an effective SEO strategy. When you’re ready to make changes to your site, it’s essential to understand what you need to do to retain your SEO strength.
What Are the Main Aspects of an SEO Preservation Campaign?
SEO Preservation can be an extremely complex process requiring data collection, analysis, and a deep understanding of your site’s infrastructure and existing SEO techniques. By necessity, the exact steps of SEO Preservation will be unique to your website. However, there are three overarching elements:
- Recognizing effective aspects of your existing SEO
- Understanding common changes that occur during a site upgrade or redesign
- Creating a comprehensive plan to manage SEO for the new site

- Crawl your current website to get information on its structure, layout, and metadata
- Perform an audit of your current site to understand how your existing SEO works and find any existing problems
- Develop of a test version of your new site on a temporary URL with settings that discourage search engine indexing
- Crawl and test the new website to understand its structure and see how it compares to your old site
- Gather and analyze data from the new site to identify problems and fix them
- Submit the new site XML to search engines
- Monitor the performance of the new site for ongoing SEO
When Should You Consider SEO Preservation?
The best time to implement an SEO preservation plan is before you make significant changes to your site. While it is usually possible to go back and fix unintentional SEO problems that occur during a site update, this process can be time-consuming and frustrating. As soon as you decide to make some changes or improvements to your website, the next step should be creating a plan to preserve your SEO.
Protecting Your SEO and Creating New Opportunities
It’s essential to keep your company’s website up to date; regular upgrades increase brand cohesion and ensure visitors see fresh content. When you’re ready to redesign your site, you can protect search engine rankings by developing and following an SEO Preservation plan.
Effective SEO Preservation can be a complex and time-consuming process, so it’s a great candidate for outsourcing. Professional SEO managers can ensure your search ranking status withstands changes to your website. With an expert managing the SEO, you can feel confident that your site will continue to perform well after every update.? If you are looking to update your site soon,?contact us?and let us show you how we can help preserve your web presence.