A Strategic Guide for Corporate Website Redesign
When redesigning a corporate website, the conversation often starts with visuals, features, and usability. But underneath all of that is a crucial layer often overlooked until it’s too late: site architecture. A well-structured site doesn’t just organize information for the user—it powers how search engines understand your business and how AI-powered discovery tools like generative engine optimization (GEO) rank your authority.
For corporate websites—especially those with legacy content—the stakes are higher. Historic URLs, archived news, case studies, and foundational service pages often carry years of SEO equity. Preserving that during a redesign is not just important—it’s strategic.
Understanding the Foundation: Why Site Architecture Matters
Site architecture refers to the structural layout of your website—how pages are organized, interlinked, and accessed. It defines user flows and impacts everything from navigation and accessibility to SEO indexing.
For enterprise organizations, it also mirrors how the brand has evolved: product shifts, service additions, regional growth, and content marketing investments. Good information architecture honors this legacy while preparing for scalability and discoverability in a modern context.
1. Audit the Existing Site with a GEO & SEO Lens
Before laying a single wireframe, start by auditing the current structure. The goal is to identify what needs to be retained, redirected, or repurposed.
Key actions:
- Crawl the current site using tools like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to gather data on existing URLs, internal links, page performance, and backlinks.
- Flag high-authority pages—older blog posts, industry resources, or product documentation that drive traffic or earn backlinks.
- Segment historical content by function: evergreen content, legacy campaign pages, past events, or archived press.
Why it matters:
AI-powered search tools favor content with longevity and authority. Even if it’s older, if it’s still relevant and linked, it contributes to your domain’s trustworthiness and contextual ranking for both GEO and SEO.
2. Preserve URL Equity Through Redirects
A new web design often brings new page templates, paths, and slugs—but your existing URLs have SEO value that should not be discarded.
Best practices:
- Maintain existing URLs where possible, especially for high-performing content.
- Create 301 redirects from old pages to their new equivalents, ensuring the link equity and indexing power is preserved.
- Avoid redirect chains—too many hops can confuse search engines and reduce ranking power.
Pro tip:
Redirect even outdated content to a relevant current page (not just the homepage), especially if it has backlinks pointing to it.
3. Rebuild Navigation for Users and Bot
Many corporate sites grow organically over years, resulting in bloated or unclear navigation. A redesign is a perfect opportunity to streamline while reinforcing key messaging.
Focus areas:
- Create clear hierarchy and labeling that reflects your brand’s most strategic offerings.
- Use breadcrumb trails and contextual menus to help search engines map relationships between content clusters.
- Ensure every page is no more than 3 clicks deep for both usability and crawlability.
Internal linking tip:
Use anchor text that reinforces target keywords and connects legacy content to newer thematic sections—for example, linking older product launch blogs to current product overview pages.
4. Retain Structured Data and Metadata
During redesigns, metadata often gets stripped out or replaced. But schema.org markup, meta titles, and descriptions contribute heavily to how your site is understood by both traditional search engines and AI assistants.
Checklist:
- Retain or enhance structured data (e.g., Article, Product, Organization, Breadcrumb schemas).
- Keep historic metadata intact where the content stays the same.
- Optimize titles and descriptions using updated brand language without removing the keywords that work.
5. Archive Smartly, Don’t Delete
Old press releases, whitepapers, and campaign microsites can feel outdated—but they are part of your digital legacy. In the eyes of search engines, they’re also a sign of depth and authority.
Instead of deleting:
- Mark older pages with updated context if they contain obsolete references, preserving their link equity without confusing the reader.
- Create an “Insights Archive” or “Press History” section that houses older—but still relevant—material.
- Use noindex tags for content you want users to access but not index, such as expired job postings.
6. Interlinking Between Old and New Content
If you’re launching new service areas or campaigns, connect them directly to legacy content. This helps transfer authority and creates a seamless story arc for both users and algorithms.
Tactics:
- Add “From the Archive” links to new articles.
- Update legacy content with contextual links to new landing pages.
- Embed crosslinks in callout boxes, footers, and related content modules.
7. Test Everything Before You Launch
SEO losses during a redesign often happen because redirects are missed, metadata is stripped, or crawlability is broken. Before go-live:
- Run a full crawl of the staging site.
- Compare old vs. new URL maps.
- Check for broken links, redirect loops, orphaned pages.
GEO engines use similar signals to build contextual memory and user preference patterns. Broken structure can mean losing your footprint in AI-driven ranking systems, which don’t tolerate disjointed experiences.
Designing for the Future, Honoring the Past
Site architecture in a corporate redesign isn’t just a technical task—it’s a strategic discipline. By preserving historically important content, you maintain your domain’s trust signals, backlink authority, and contextual depth. These are the very elements that GEO, SEO, and AI look for when determining what brands are worth surfacing—and which are not.
If you’re considering a corporate site redesign and want to ensure your digital history isn’t lost in the process, talk to us at ArtVersion. We’ve helped Fortune 500 companies and legacy brands modernize their experiences while amplifying—not erasing—the equity they’ve built.