SEO as a game changer for a seamless website relaunch
Akta.ba is one of the leading business portals in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It features a business news portal, a tender service, and a detailed company and institution registry. Over the past two decades, they have been able to greatly serve the business community in BiH with this unique mix of offerings.
Personally, one of the most interesting things about this media outlet for me is that they have been able to monetise part of their business information services very early in their journey, a great lesson that you have to think out of the box and be brave on certain fronts.
During the second half of 2024, Akta.ba was actively focused on launching a new updated website, one that will provide better user navigation and experience, while offering a modern, professional and up-to-date look.
During the final preparations for the launch, Akta.ba’s editorial team made a very smart move – decided to conduct a detailed SEO audit to ensure that the new platform not only looked great, but also kept their organic SEO traffic and further performed better in search rankings.
Why was this a very smart move?
What I’ve seen in many web redesign projects is that SEO is usually forgotten and left as a post-launch activity, but even then it rarely gets the attention it deserves.
SEO is a very important thing for every media outlet. If done right it can be a significant part of media’s traffic sources – there are cases where 50%+ of the media outlet’s traffic comes from SEO – it is free, and intent-based traffic source, meaning the user is actively seeking the information in the moment when it discovers the page, not having it pushed in their face like other social media platforms tend to do…
Akta’s decision to address this in the pre-launch stage turned out to be crucial for preservation of their existing traffic and to keep them on their competitive edge, while also making sure their new website respects the search engine standards, as these are easily forgotten when focus is on the shiny things like front-end bugs, design features, content improvements and overall UX boost.
I would argue that the prior weeks to the new launch is the perfect time for SEO audit and improvements, and here is my reasoning why:
Perfect timing: the resources are here and focused
In this stage of the project, all eyes are on the prize – the new website is eagerly anticipated by all stakeholders and team members, and focus is put on its perfection. Technical resources, while crazy busy, are available and, most importantly, fully aware of all the bits and pieces of the new website, its backend, front-end, and all the challenges and limitations. This makes executing SEO audit findings and recommendations much easier and one can argue that it even provides higher quality implementation at this stage than at any other stage.
Additional testing: SEO serves like an additional QA layer
Doing a proper SEO audit usually uncovers other hidden bugs, mostly “below the hood”. So, consider it like another layer of quality assurance (QA). It can identify performance issues, unnecessary code, and even completely wrong configurations of certain settings on the website – like HTML tags or canonical URLs.
Mitigation of risks for traffic drops
When a new website is launched or major redesign is done, usually there is a completely new code, URL structure or redirects for the search crawlers to analyse, and those long enough in the industry have seen it that search engines like to play it safe. When a big change is detected, usually there is a partial, short-term drop in traffic from organic sources, until search engine crawling and indexing analysis is completed and they are assured the website has not switched from a popular sports website to a betting or scam one. Keep in mind, in order for your website to win in organic search, Google and other search engines need to win as well. It is a mutualistic relationship.
Assuring potential for growth
Completing the audit and executing on it before the launch, puts your media outlet in the proper trajectory – for growth. When you assure your robots.txt, canonical URLs, meta tags, content duplication checks and performance are all set properly, you can expect growth in the search engine results, given that you are doing your job properly on all other segments as well.
It can improve UX and add features
With an SEO audit, you can be sure that your SSL and performance on both web and mobile are functioning properly amongst all other nitty details, but you can also uncover new features that you may have not thought about, like Accessibility compliance and you can also assure UX is not shaken up by broken links.
How to conduct an SEO audit?
Conducting an SEO audit before launching a redesigned website involves systematic checks and improvements to ensure the site meets the spoken and unspoken standards of the industry. Here’s a quick map of where to start and how to execute it:
- Analyse the current web performance
– Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to identify top-performing pages, traffic sources, and keywords
– Know where the website has been standing in the past and what kind of validation or other SEO problems it has been having.
– Make a note of the number of indexed pages as well as average search engine rankings results (SERPs). - Get URL structure and redirects right
– Check the existing URL structure for any necessary updates or improvements, for example, if you are changing your URL structure of all news articles, make sure you have proper redirects from the previously indexed URLs. So, if your old website had a structure such as www.example.com/54123 and your new one has www.example.com/sample-article referring to the same page, make sure the /53123 one has a proper redirect to the /sample-article.
– Create a comprehensive 301 redirect map to ensure users and search engines are guided to the new site pages. Having a link taking you to the wrong place is one of the worst experiences for the users.
- Check meta data and open graph tags
– Audit title tags, meta descriptions, and headers to align with target keywords and user intent.
– Avoid duplicate metadata and ensure they are unique for each page. - Perform technical SEO audit
– Validate the sitemap and robots.txt file for proper configuration.
– Run a site crawl using tools like Google Lighthouse to identify errors like broken links, duplicate content, or missing alt attributes. - Focus on what Google is telling you
– Test and improve loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability for both desktop and mobile users based on the Google page speed tests
– Compress images, use caching, and optimise server performance to meet Google’s Core Web Vitals standards. - Mobile needs to be properly optimised
– Ensure the site is fully responsive and performs well across all devices, with the highest focus put on mobile. Face it, you might love your web version design, but users are actually accessing your website from mobile.
– Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to identify and resolve any mobile usability issues. - Discover and implement Schema.org
– Add structured data to enhance search visibility with rich snippets for articles, tenders (in Akta’s case), and other key content that will boost your search engine performance. - Check your links
– Audit internal links to create a logical and user-friendly site hierarchy.
– Ensure no orphan pages exist and that all key pages are easily accessible. - Check what the competitors are doing
– Study competitors’ SEO strategies, including keywords, backlink profiles, and content structure. Check their codes, robots and sitemaps and assure you know what kind of game they are playing.
– Identify gaps and opportunities to differentiate your site in search rankings. - Do an on-page analysis
– Make sure your content is well formatted, that it includes the targeted keywords in proper structure and that you avoid penalised things like keyword stuffing or duplicate content.
- Monitor, monitor, monitor
– Use the free Google Search Console and if budget allows other SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to monitor your performance and indexing. Setup these tools and make sure you have alerts when problems occur.
– Do not give up on SEO, it is a game that doesn’t yield instant results
Nothing is easy
Akta.ba was able to preserve their existing traffic and jump on a potential growth trajectory by doing the required SEO things proactively, instead of reactively – which is a much harder thing to do.
Akta benefited significantly from these proactive measures because they minimised the risks of getting bad organic results post-launch, because the SEO audit discovered some important missing elements that were quickly fixed by their team.
But, SEO is not simple nor easy to implement, and it changes daily. So knowing this, you should not expect perfection, and will have to change your mindset towards constant progress. Some things are very easy to implement, but some are a big pain and take a lot of time to get them right. So again, don’t focus on 100/100 page scores or having all checkboxes checked out, but prioritising and doing the right thing, step by step.
