No matter how successful your website has been at attracting web users to your content and converting prospects to new clients, there comes a time for a complete update and redesign. The challenge is to successfully blend the old and the new, keeping up with the times while also maintaining your clinic’s SEO ranking and online visibility.
Follow these tips on SEO ranking for a site redesign to keep your website on Google’s radar while you give your brand a facelift.
Does Your Site Really Need Changing?
Before you invest the time and resources to build a brand-new clinic website, you should consider whether the changes you plan to make are truly necessary. Giving your website a new look and design can convey to the public that your practice is growing, but you need to be sure that you have enough substance to support that perception.
Here are a few good reasons for a site redesign that can increase traffic for your practice:
- Your goals have changed, you’ve implemented new and improved services, or you’ve added talented staff members and want to share this information
- Do you want to change your website colors or aesthetic to better match your current branding
- Your website’s hosting service is changing
- You want your site to be more accessible on mobile devices
- You’re increasing the loading speed of your web pages
- You want to make your site easier to use for everyone, including those with disabilities
Even Good Changes Can Create Hiccups
You may be revamping your practice’s website for all the right reasons, but any changes can disrupt an established flow of data between your site and Google.
Your ranking can be affected when you change or combine URLs, since these components may have backlinks and other data attached to them that Google has come to recognize. Your web developer will need to provide redirects to your new pages and information, to avoid a downgrade in your SEO ranking.
List Your Specific Website Priorities Before Redesign Begins
Now that you have a clear understanding of your reasons for a website overhaul, it’s time to make an itemized list of the specific changes you want to make or elements you want to add. Collaborate on this list with your web developer, and present them with any questions or concerns you have before your redesign begins.
Gather critical information about your site by taking inventory of your database information, plugins, website themes, and associated files. Be sure to check your website’s current SEO standing via Google Search Console or in Google’s index.
User Experience (UX) is Key
Providing visitors with the most accurate information in the shortest time possible should be among your top priorities. To accomplish this, you need to stay aware of changing consumer expectations.
Consider the conversations you have with patients and prospects daily, and your understanding of common health conditions and treatment trends in medical care as you anticipate consumer needs and aim to meet them. The end goals of making changes to your website should include improving its speed and ease of use for visitors as they seek ways to improve their health and quality of life.
Test Your New Website Before It Goes Live
If you have a relatively small clinic and a simple website, you may be able to forego this step. However, if your practice is well-established, with a large website requiring multiple changes, you could benefit from using a test site prior to launching.
A separate site for testing your new design will prevent Google from crawling your new content and incomplete pages before they’re ready to launch, to preserve your current SEO ranking. It will also prevent visitors and potential clients from visiting your website while it’s under construction.
Your web developer can create a Staging Environment that includes a temporary URL on a staging server for your new site. This prototype site will allow for testing and auditing of its new components. During this evaluation and debugging stage, traffic will continue as usual to your old site, and users will be able to engage with your content without affecting your SEO.
While you are completing your redesign and creating a new SEO strategy for your therapy practice, your developer can block Google from crawling your new content in a couple of ways:
- HTTP Authentication: Anyone attempting to access the site will need to enter an ID or password.
- IP Whitelisting: No one can view the site except users from a predetermined list of IP addresses.
Carefully Check Your Changes
After your changes have been tested and evaluated, you can remove your new website from the temporary server and URL, and place it on your active server with your permanent URL. One final review will be needed to ensure that everything is working as intended.
In your post-launch analysis, check these items:
- Mobile device responsiveness
- Sitemap errors
- Page loading speeds
- Redirects – are they leading to the right places?
- Broken links – if these are present, have them removed
- Titles, Headings, Meta Data Descriptions – are they all accurate?
Patient Care Always Comes First
Change is an inevitable part of business success, and that often involves upgrading your website to make it more relevant to your audience. But in the course of redesigning your website, never forget to keep patient care at the core of all decision-making. If the changes to your website reflect this number-one priority, your SEO ranking will continue to soar.
