If you’re redesigning your website, chances are lots of people are giving input. Some companies feel SEO is better to handle after finishing the website design. However, redesigning your website without SEO guidance can cause costly errors. If you’re in the middle of designing your website or are about to begin, consider these reasons to hire an SEO now rather than wait.
1.) Technical/Sitemap Help
Most redesigns are more than just updating the look of the website. You may be removing pages, adding new ones, changing URLs, and making other backend changes. All of these changes impact how search engines read your website. A good SEO will have a website launch plan that will ensure there are no major SEO or technical errors when the site goes live. The plan might include redirect patterns, creating sitemaps, ensuring your new website is indexable, and helping to set up Google Analytics and Search Console.
2.) Performance and Page Speed
Is your new website going to load faster than the old one? If you’re not sure, it’s better to have an SEO examine the design and structure before spending tons of money building the page out. With Core Web Vitals and overall speed becoming more of an organic ranking factor, an SEO can tell you how to optimize your new design for speed.
3.) Content Optimizations
With the new design likely comes new or refreshed content for many pages. An SEO partner will review the content changes and perform keyword research and audit the content to ensure you’re optimized correctly. This is a great time to discuss the next steps for SEO, too, as this type of review would be necessary whenever you hire a new SEO partner.
4.) Ongoing SEO Planning
When an SEO reviews your new website, they’ll audit not only the existing content but also include tips for new pages and other opportunities to increase your organic search. They may recommend building links to a specific page or expanding your content strategy to touch on a new topic they found. Either way, you’ll get more than just a technical review of the website, you’ll also get an expert to help plan for the future.
5.) Post Launch Monitoring
Once the website is live and submitted to search engines, an SEO will monitor KPIs to ensure there are red flags like missing redirects or significant traffic drops. The benefit of this is you catch mistakes before they get too bad, and you can fix them quickly.
