Website redesign is not only an aesthetics exercise, it’s a package deal. A nice exterior doesn’t help much if users can’t find your website. And that’s where a good SEO strategy comes in. Here are five necessary SEO steps to take during your next website redesign:

1. Audit your website

Before you start reorganising your website, make sure you determine what is working and what is not. You have to learn from your web site and most importantly, discover areas of improvement.  It is important to make a proper audit and focus on the following key metrics:

•  Number of visits/visitors/unique visitors (monthly average)
• Top performing keywords
• Number of inbound linking domains
• Total number of total pages indexed
• Total number of pages that receive traffic

2. Create a blog for your website, if you don’t have one already

We’ve been talking about the importance of blogs and relevant content for your readers a lot. Setting up a blog page on your website where you can publish relevant, informative content regularly is crucial for your SEO strategy. The trick is to publish content which your prospective customers search for and love reading. You don’t only create a trustful relationship with your customers, but you will also be viewed as a thought leader in your industry. Additionally, by using relevant keywords, your organic traffic will improve greatly. However, when creating and posting content be aware the Google Panda algorithm which filters search engine results based on the quality of content active on sites.

3. Identify commonly searched keywords

Google’s Penguin algorithm is able to identify and ‘punish’ web sites that have too many poorly placed keywords. You have to make sure that you have high-quality content (that Google ‘loves’) and place appropriate keywords throughout your website that fit naturally into the content. For proper SEO, each web site needs a single focus keyword and its repetition in the body content, page title, meta description and H1. As a general rule, the way you choose and use your keywords can make or break your SEO strategy.

4. Implement responsive design

Responsive design is your best opportunity for delivering great search and browsing experience to mobile users. But it’s not only making your pages mobile-optimised, but making your site responsive with CSS means adapting all layouts to viewport sizes. Having a responsive design means configuring your pages to make it easier for Google to crawl them and retrieve your content.

5. Add analytics tracking to your site

Finally, it is important to analyse your current website’s performance against your old website’s metrics. Don’t forget to paste the proper analytics code onto the new website in order to track the success of the new pages. Also, make sure you monitor the metrics constantly with the proper analytics software (you can use Google Analytics or HubSpot to measure your website’s performance).