SEO from UX perspective — Part 1: new structure
When we deal with a website relaunch, sooner or later the topic of SEO comes up. It is important that the new website is on top of the Google search results for topics that are most relevant to us. Not only on the first page, but preferably at the top.
But how do we achieve this and at what point should we start thinking about SEO? These are questions that probably affect everyone who is involved in the relaunch. Even though there are SEO experts who deal in detail with all questions around SEO, it is important to keep the ranking in mind when doing the first concept approach.
Being involved on the earliest point in the relaunch process my role as a UX-Designer gives me the opportunity and responsibility to set the guidelines for a search engine optimized website. Through research, seminars, and experience from my day-to-day agency work, I’ve defined some basics that I’d like to share with anyone involved in a website relaunch. This is the first of three articles: SEO from UX perspective — Part 1: new structure.
A new sitemap
Using Google Analytics data from the current website, we can learn about our target group and identify typical user flows. From this we can identify interests, problems and successes. Later on we define what should be improved or maintained to provide our target group with the best possible user experience.
We then inspect the content of the current website in detail, merge it in a useful way, reduce it if necessary and make it snackable. This leads to new pages and a new page structure. In most cases, this new sitemap is quite different to the old one. In the course of the relaunch, it is important to show Google where the old pages and content have been moved to. For this, a short excursion into technical SEO is necessary.
Technical SEO: Maintain link power and avoid ranking loss
We imagine a user reading an article on a web page that links to our old page to prove its content and support it thematically. The user clicks on a link and receives the following error message: “Error 404 — the requested page could not be found”. In our use case, there was probably a website relaunch. The page was not “moved”. This is bad for our user and for our website, because our link power from this link source is gone.
Link strength is important because Google uses it as a ranking criterion, among other things. If we lose our links, we may be ranked lower in the search results. Google knows our content and our pages, consequently notices when they are no longer accessible. How Google analyzes or indexes our page through the so-called “crawling” is explained in the article “How does Google search work?” .
To avoid the supposed loss of traffic and ranking, we should set redirects. Here, the link power is transferred to the new URL. This is usually done by techies. Since the website is restructured in the concept, it is best to define where old content is to be placed.
Using tools and setting redirects
To be able to achieve this, we should first know all the URLs and, above all, find the relevant pages with links. For this, various tools are available, such as the Google Search Console, Ryte or ScreamingFrog, to quickly get an overview. Google describes exactly how this works in the Google Search Console in the Search Console Help Center. The lists that can be generated there can be downloaded from most tools, so that we can use them to plan the necessary URL redirects.
To visualize this, we can place the old URLs next to the new page in our new sitemap. This shows that the content of the old page was located there. For developers or DevOps, this means that a permanent redirect with the status code 301 is set here (“301 Moved Permanently”). For this, the contents of the new page should be very similar to those of the old page. A redirect is also acceptable when merging topics. It is important that no chained links are built here.
It often happens that pages are no longer needed. So this content is no longer relevant or outdated, for example. For this, the pages should be set to “gone” (status code 410) so that Google understands that this page is deactivated on purpose. Also after the relaunch we can check with our tools if all links or deactivations were set correctly.
Conclusion
This brings us to the end of the first part of the report about SEO from a UX designer’s point of view. It’s easy to create a new page structure that sets the first building block for a SEO basis. With a few steps, the risk of ranking loss can be reduced. Of course, this requires a few more steps. In the second part, I’ll talk about creating relevant content and how important keywords can be.
Here you can read the german version: https://medium.com/jung-von-matt-tech/seo-aus-ux-sicht-teil-1-neue-struktur-d98bb1a1e14
Jung von Matt/TECH is a data-driven and technology focused boutique within the Jung von Matt group. Jung von Matt is — in terms of awards for both creativity and efficiency — the most successful advertising agency group in German-speaking countries. We help our clients and partners to be digital pioneers by using technology plus data to develop digital platforms, products and services that create momentum.
