Hi, I’m Lukas Juodagalvis
a Professional SEO specialist. Professional SEO specialist.

Microsoft Bing’s New Role in the Search Landscape

How to Plan a Website for Maximum SEO Success

Creating a website that retains and enhances your SEO performance can be a challenge, especially during redesigns. Many businesses unintentionally damage their existing rankings, leading to loss of traffic, which can impact visibility, leads, and sales. In this guide, we’ll explore how to plan a new website that preserves existing SEO strength while building a foundation for growth.

Common SEO Mistakes in Website Redesigns

Too often, businesses finish a website redesign only to discover that their SEO hasn’t been considered, resulting in traffic loss. A lack of planning often leads to costly fixes and extended timeframes to recover rankings.

One case involved a six-figure website redesign project that inadvertently destroyed the company’s SEO. Months of work, coupled with significant costs, were required to restore traffic, with additional expenses for PPC to make up for the lost organic traffic.

The Importance of SEO Planning

Effective SEO begins with a clear, detailed plan that involves input from all stakeholders. Without proper planning, unexpected issues can arise during development, leading to last-minute changes, delays, or additional costs.

This article outlines five key steps to help you retain SEO traffic while building an SEO-friendly website structure.

Five Steps to Create an SEO-Friendly Website

1. Analyze Existing Rankings and Traffic

Before making any changes to your website, it’s essential to understand where your traffic comes from. Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to identify the following:

• High-ranking keywords
• High-traffic pages
• High-opportunity keywords and content

This data helps you identify pages that are crucial to your traffic. If these pages are not properly migrated or optimized, it can lead to a significant drop in traffic.

How to Use Google Search Console:

Navigate to Performance > Search Results and explore the queries and pages tabs. Sort by clicks and impressions to identify top-performing keywords and high-potential opportunities. Document this data to guide your content migration.

2. Set Clear SEO and Website Goals

Clearly defined goals are essential for ensuring a successful project. These goals should be measurable and aligned with both SEO objectives and broader business targets.

Some common goals include:

• Increasing leads or sales from the website
• Improving rankings for service or product pages
• Enhancing rankings for top-funnel marketing content

For SEO, specific goals might include ranking higher for certain keywords or improving conversion rates from organic traffic. Always remember to create SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound).

3. Define Audience and Customer Segments

Understanding your target audience is key to designing a site structure that resonates with them. Define the demographics of your audience, such as age, gender, location, and online behavior.

For each segment, ask:

• What are their goals or problems?
• Where do they typically search for information online?

This information will guide your website structure, making it easier to optimize for different audience needs. It will also help you create content that speaks directly to your target users, which is essential for successful SEO.

4. Create a Site Structure and Sitemap

A clear sitemap helps organize the content and ensures the site structure aligns with both SEO and user experience goals. The sitemap should include all high-traffic pages from your current site, ensuring they are integrated into the new design without losing SEO value.

Building the Sitemap:

Start by outlining your main categories and subcategories. Include essential pages like the homepage, service pages, blog categories, and contact pages. Tools like Draw.io can help you create visual sitemaps that are easy to share with stakeholders.

5. Plan Page Content and Scope

For each page on the new site, define the following:

• Goal: What is the primary purpose of the page (e.g., lead generation, funneling traffic)?
• Features: List any functionality needed (e.g., forms, CTAs).
• Content: Specify text, images, videos, and SEO elements like titles and meta descriptions.

By scoping out each page in detail, you ensure that every piece of content is aligned with your goals and optimized for search engines.

SEO-Specific Considerations

Redirections and Content Migration

When launching a new site, ensure that high-performing pages are redirected to their new URLs. Failing to do so can result in broken links and loss of SEO value. Also, ensure all meta titles and descriptions are carried over for high-traffic pages.

Monitor Performance After Launch

After launching your new site, monitor SEO performance through Google Search Console and track rankings, traffic, and impressions. This will help you identify any issues early on and make necessary adjustments.

Google’s Growing Recognition of Content Creators: What SEO Professionals Need to Know

Google is increasingly identifying individuals as content creators across various industries. This recognition is becoming more visible in Knowledge Panels, where subtitles such as “Content Creator (Medicine)” or “Content Creator (Travel)” are appearing. These developments signal a significant change in Google’s emphasis on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) and its application to content creators.

Why Google is Focusing on Content Creators

Google’s recent updates show a clear focus on identifying and associating authoritative individuals with the content they produce. This development highlights the importance of understanding how SEO experts can adapt and optimize for this new landscape.

Key Events Highlighting This Trend

Several events in 2023 and 2024 underline Google’s ongoing interest in identifying content creators:

1. Killer Whale Knowledge Graph Update (July 2023): This update significantly expanded the number of person entities recognized by Google.
2. E-E-A-T Update (March 2024): Reinforced the importance of connecting people to their content.
3. Google Leak (May 2024): Confirmed Google’s association of people with their articles and profile pages, further solidifying the connection between creators and their online content.

What This Means for SEO and E-E-A-T

Google’s recognition of content creators plays a crucial role in E-E-A-T, as it enables the search engine to link content with authoritative individuals. This development changes the way SEO professionals must approach content optimization, with a new emphasis on building person-to-content relationships.

To succeed in this environment, it’s essential to not only optimize the content itself but also to optimize the content creator and website publisher entities.

How to Optimize Content Creators for SEO

1. Understandability

It’s essential to create clear relationships between content creators and the reference pages that Google uses for verification. Ideal pages include:

• The creator’s personal website
• The “About” page on the employer’s website
• Social media profiles
• Trusted third-party sources (e.g., Crunchbase, Wikidata)

2. Credibility

Establish connections between content creators and their relevant content. This includes:

• Articles they’ve written
• Videos or podcasts they’ve been featured in
• Interviews they’ve given or been mentioned in
• Articles written about them

3. Deliverability

Expand the creator’s digital presence by producing new content and ensuring it is:

• Clear
• Consistent
• Relevant
• Factually accurate

Use a hub-and-spoke model, with the creator’s personal website as the hub, linking all relevant content across the web. This helps Google and AI systems make connections and strengthen the content creator’s authority.

How to Check If Google Recognizes a Content Creator

To verify if Google recognizes a content creator, you can search for one of their articles. Click the three vertical dots next to the result in the SERPs. If Google shows the author’s name and description, this confirms that Google has established a relationship between the author and the content.

Why Continuous Optimization is Essential

The relationships between person entities and URLs are not static. Google’s algorithms are constantly updating, sometimes recalibrating entities or even deleting them. For example, during the Killer Whale update, the number of recognized person entities tripled in a single day, significantly impacting the SEO landscape.

Ongoing monitoring and maintenance of these relationships are essential, especially for newer or less-established person entities.

Building Topical Authority for Content Creators

Topical authority is a key element in SEO today. To build topical authority for content creators, it’s important to develop URL-to-entity relationships both for the topics and for the creators themselves. As this authority grows, Google may assign a subtitle such as “Content Creator (Topic),” further signaling the individual’s expertise in a specific field.

Future Outlook: AI Assistants and Knowledge Graphs

Search engines and AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Alexa, and Siri, are adopting similar strategies to Google in terms of identifying content creators and organizing content into Knowledge Graphs. This trend emphasizes the need for SEO professionals to stay current with the evolving digital landscape and focus on person-to-page relationships.

Conclusion: What Modern SEO Experts Should Do

To stay ahead in this evolving SEO landscape, it’s crucial to focus on building and maintaining the relationships between content creators and the web pages associated with them. This strategy not only improves search rankings but also enhances visibility in Knowledge Panels, AI Overviews, and other search features.

SEO professionals should apply this strategy to their clients’ content creators to ensure SERP visibility, topical authority, and improved rankings in Google’s ever-changing search ecosystem.