 Did you know that whenever we are rebuilding a website, whether it's for a client or for ourselves, that it is very easy for us to damage the SEO value to that website unless if we do a couple other things and make sure we do them right. And SEO is a huge part of building a website, even if we're just web designers and developers, there are still something some SEO practices that are essential to know and do if we are going to be building websites. And in this video, I'm going to show you how to maintain that SEO value, but most importantly, how not to destroy it. What's up everyone, I'm Jeffrey at Lightbox, and this is part two to a new series, SEO for Elementor, BreakSent, well, any WordPress website really because it all applies the same. These are for the web designers and developers and how we could build websites that are more SEO friendly, optimized, and to add more value in the websites that we create. And if you do find this is helping you out, then make sure to subscribe, like and do all that good YouTube stuff, because there are a lot more of these coming out. Alright, so in this video, we're going to look at five things we need to do. I'm going to show you my own checklist whenever rebuilding a site that needs to be done to maintain that SEO. And the very last item on that list is the most crucial one. It's the one that is the most common error that destroys SEO. So make sure to definitely do the very last item on this checklist. Alright, let's go ahead and jump in. So really quickly, there is a link inside the description, I'm going to leave a download for the checklist that you could use and add to your own process. But I'm going to walk through my checklist right here. So the first step is we need to determine the state of SEO the current site is in. We need to know how much SEO value is in the site just kind of get an estimate of it, because that's going to let us know the risk factor is this a high risk of losing a lot of SEO or is it a low risk. Now to determine the state of SEO, here are a few things to look at. One is how old is the website. And this is something that takes place in the conversation with the client. So the site is less than a year old odds are it's not going to hold too much SEO value and be a lower risk. But if the site is old if it's been around for several years, even if the site looks terrible, even if it's an old outdated website, it could still hold a whole lot of SEO value in it. So the age does make a difference because a longer website is around, the more value is accumulating. The next one is finding out does the website have an SEO plugin added and has work been done on that plugin. Now really quickly, I'll show you the back end of our website. And this is something you want to take a look at. First is there an SEO plugin, or we can see here, we do have one already added in there. So the next step we will look at is to go to the pages and go through the pages and blog posts and see have things been added to it. So I could go say to a blog post right here. And I could check out one of the blog posts and let's see how it looks like in the SEO part. And if we go down to our SEO settings, well, we could see work has been done in here, we could see the title is in here, and then we could see keywords have been added. So right off the bat, we could see work has been done over here. And then the same thing with the pages, here's a web page. If we go to the web page, we can see that stuff has been added in here. So we got keywords added meta description added and title added. So this is an indicator right here that there has been work done on the website. And the next step right here would be to determine how much work has been done on it and who did the work. And this again takes place with conversations with the client. I would ask the client, did you have an SEO expert work on this? Did you pay for SEO services before? Or was this just the web developer from before that added, you know, all the keywords and the meta titles and description. Next is to check the traffic and the backlinks. Now the traffic would be really easy if we got access to the Google Analytics, we could always ask the client before we take the project, do they have analytics? Can they give us access? Or could they even just take a screenshot showing us what kind of traffic that they are getting. But there are other tools and ways to check as well. And the other one that's really important is the backlinks. I always want to check the backlinks. Also, I'm going to be checking the domain authority and domain rating scoring. So to do this, these are the ones that I go to right here. I go to the Ahrefs to their website authority checker. And let's go ahead and put it my own website right here. And let's check this domain authority. And this right here is going to give us probably the best overview of what kind of state the SEO is in. Like right here, we see got a domain rating of 35, which is all right. That's not bad. Now every time a new website is built, it starts off at zero, because it'll have zero backlinks. And this is any time there is an external website linking to your website. And these backlinks are a big part of building that SEO value. So these are really important to look at. The next one is I like to go to SCM Rush as well. You could create a free account and do this for free on there. This is my account. It's a free one. I'll go over here to domain overview. And then inside here, I will put in a website, click on search. And I can get a general idea of the search traffic. And then here again, I got a authority score. So we got the domain authority here. And then we got the domain rating here. And between these two right here, we're getting a great sense of where the SEO is at another other couple websites to use. One would be similar website. And then the other one will be SC ranking. These are free tools that I also use as well. Just to help get an understanding of where a website is at, when we're going to rebuild one. I'll leave links to these inside the description as well. Now after finding out how old the website is, has our work been done on it? What are the backlink and traffic situations like? What's a domain authority domain rating like? Now we could determine the risk. Because if it is a low risk, then we could go in a little bit more loose and relax. But if it is a high risk, then we need to be very careful. And if it is a very high risk, we need to have a conversation with the client. Because if the client let's say for an example has a domain rating or authority of 6070 or 80, and they're getting a high amount of traffic already. Well, if we rebuild their website, and it loses a lot of that authority and it loses a lot of that traffic, well, we're basically liable and because we are causing harm to the client's website. And we don't want the client to come back saying, Hey, what did you do to our website? We stopped getting leads, you know, things are going really bad. They could have a very nice looking website, new, fresh and modern. But at the end of the day, it's a business. And what matters most to our client's business is that we're helping their businesses grow. And step number two, that is to create a strategy. And all this is is to just make a plan and include that in our process of rebuilding our client's website. It doesn't have to be some long drawn out strategy. Because remember, we are just developing and designing the website. But we do need to have a plan and be ready to add in a little bit more to the website in order to make sure we're maintaining as much SEL value as we can. Step number three, this is going to be maintain the title tags, meta descriptions and keywords. And we need to do this to the best of our ability. For an example, we're going to go back to our website right here. Now, whenever you go back to the dashboard, you could go to your settings to your general. And this is where you're going to find the site title and the site meta description, which is the tagline. So we already got our site title and our tagline here. The best thing we could do is just to keep it the same. And then in each individual page and post, you'll have a section to add that. Just like I do here, I got my title and my meta description. And then I have the keywords added. So when rebuilding the website, if this has already been done on the old website, just copy and paste it replicate it, keep it the same. And then when somebody does come in to optimize SEL, they could go ahead and optimize all this right here and make very careful thought out updates and changes to it. And step number four is going to be maintaining the site map and navigations as best as possible. Now there's a chance the client might not want all the pages or might want to add new pages, let's just try to keep the menu similar as long as it's good and it has good UI and good usability, just be very thought out about that. And let's say the client doesn't want a page, they have an old page that they don't want to put on the new website. Well, if that happens, we need to add a redirect to it, because there might be a chance or might be a backlink linking to that web page that's not being used anymore. We don't want to lose that. And that page is also index and Google so Google might keep it in there for a little while. And then as far as the navigation and site map, just try to keep it similar to the best of your ability, as much as possible and be very thought out about it. Now this part does change and there are going to be changes and differences. The thing is we want to be very careful and thought out when we do make those changes and differences, that way we can keep the SEO loss minimized. And here it is, this is the most important step right here. This is the one that could destroy your client's SEO or your own SEO. And that is to make sure you maintain and keep the same permalinks or the slugs that is already on your website. And this here is the most common error that happens. And it really does cause harm. Because if you have the URL, let's just say the about page and the about page is your domain slash about dash us. And that's your URL. Well, that is what's index inside Google. That is the page that has been building up SEO value through time that has been on there. And it might be a page that has backlinks going to it as well. Now if you rebuild the website and you make the about page would say your domain slash about instead of about dash us, it's a whole new URL, it will go to 404 errors, the backlinks could get lost to it. And all of a sudden, now you're starting out with a new URL, which is starting out from zero. So the most important thing you could do is to go through every single page and to make sure the URLs are identical as the old site. And out of everything we just went through right now, this is the most important this is the one everybody needs to do. And if you're building sites for clients, make sure you're doing that because if you're not, you're going to be harming your clients websites. And that's just the truth. And here's the thing, whenever we rebuild a client's website, there's always going to be SEO value loss, there's always going to be a dip. But by following these practices right here, we can manage how big that dip is. Because if we do something like change the whole permanent link structure, have different URLs and slugs, well, that dip could turn into a crash. So what we want to do when we are rebuilding the website is follow the best practices, try to maintain that SEO as best as we can. You can use this checklist right here. That way, when you rebuild it, the SEO will dip, but then it could come right back up. And that's what we want to do when we rebuild a website. It's also important to let clients know I like to bring this up in conversations with clients. I want them to understand this is part of the process. And I also want to charge a bit more when I am pricing a project for a client that has a rebuild website, because we do need to add an additional step to our process of designing and building the website, which is to also try to maintain that SEO to the best of our ability. Well, I hope this helped out and I got part three coming up next week. So make sure to do all the good YouTube stuff, you know, like and subscribe stuff like that. I do appreciate it. It helps out. And I do have links inside the description that could take you to the checklist, you know, it's free, no strings attached or anything like that. Also got links that are free resources that you could use to help you out for your process to help you to add SEO friendliness and optimizations to your web building process. Well, that's it for today. I'll be back again soon. Thank you.