If you are planning to restructure your website in some way then you need to consider the SEO impact of doing this and ensure you are aware of the search engine visibility of your site when you are working on these changes.
Restructuring your site can at times be easier than a complete redesign and when you are looking at changing your products it is often more appropriate to move pages around than perform a total redesign. However, if you are removing pages from your site, you need to make sure that this is handled in a way that will stop Google from having issues crawling your site.
If the pages you are going to remove are being replaced with new pages with similar content consider keeping the existing URL and just updating the content on this page. However, if this is not possible, make sure that the old URLs are 301 redirected to the new page so that Google can see that the page it has indexed has removed and replaced with the new page.
If the pages you are removing from the site are not being replaced make sure that the URL shows a error page with a 404 header status, and make sure that these pages are no longer mentioned in the sitemap.xml file on your site.
When you are looking at the navigation of your site make sure that no pages are orphaned in the process of the restructure. You can use Google Webmaster tools to help spot orphaned pages once these are live but it’s best to spot these before you go live.
Remember to consider the conversions you are offering on the site before implementing your changes. Make sure that your conversion form is visible on the site and has only the required fields and is not asking for unnecessary information that can be off putting for your potential customers. If you have not yet looked at the conversion methods on your site this is something to consider when restructuring your site.
When adding new pages to your website you need to ensure that these pages are optimised before putting them live.
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