The steps to optimizing your website redesign involve strategy that is geared toward reducing the level of risk to your already-existing organic search engine rankings and profits. If the redesign project is not constructed in a manner that is SEO-friendly, the redesign can result in an unforeseen drop in site traffic and rankings. Taking these key factors into consideration during the redesign process will drastically reduce those risks.
1. LINKS
The best place to begin a website redesign is with an inventory of one's existing site links. Be sure to note which are the most relevant links — and where they are coming from. You should contact the sources of these sites and ask them to update their links to direct traffic to your new site pages. It is also important to reinstate all inbound links.
Another important consideration is the interlinking of your website's pages. This serves to ensure that search engines —and human visitors —are able to access all of important content on your site.
2. CRUCIAL CONTENT
Search engines crawl, index, and rank all websites according to optimized content. Therefore, you should make sure that all your content is optimized for your site's specific key words and phrases.
The first step in determining the best content for a site begins with defining the site's audience. Start with the right persona. It can help to upload a survey to ask clients what they like best about the original website, and what they would change, if given the opportunity.
3. PAY ATTENTION TO PAGE SIZE
Too much text or not having enough optimized text can negatively affect how the website's relevance is perceived by the search engines. Keep the general purpose of the website in mind, when designing pages, and consider what the customers need, in terms of content and why visitors would want to go to the site. Observe customer behaviors and learn the most frequent actions they take when they arrive on the site, as opposed to what the webmaster wants them to do. Once their motivation has been discovered, strive to design a website that will make it easy for them to do it.
4. KEEP AN EYE ON THE COMPETITION
A website redesign project is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. While the project should not be solely based on what the competition is doing, make a point of being mindful of the directions in which successful competitors are moving, and assess whether or not their approaches will work for the particular redesign project under consideration. Every project should be customized to include original aspects, and to also reflect those elements that work well for the competition.
5. OPTIMIZE FOR FUNCTIONALITY
Every successful website has specific elements that make the site functional and user-friendly. By considering ways in which to make the redesign more functional, decisions can be made about whether to implement tracking metrics, such as Google Analytics. Tracking metrics can give the webmaster a fairly accurate quantitative measurement of the success or failure of any redesign.
6. MAKE THE REDESIGN MOBILE-FRIENDLY
Smartphones and tablets are now commanding a position in cyberspace that was once ruled by desktops and laptops alone. Any new redesign project should have a plan for being responsive in order to accommodate a larger viewing audience.
7. MARKETING GOALS
Any website's marketing goals will depend on the purpose of the site itself. Some sites are designed to provide customer support, while others are designed to sell a product. Still others are designed to provide information or to persuade readers to behave in a certain way.
The marketing goals of the site should be clearly defined from the beginning in order for them to be tracked and measured with KPIs or Key Performance Indicators. These measurable values that can show a webmaster how effectively a website is achieving its primary objectives. High KPIs may provide the webmaster information about the overall performance of the website, while lower KPI numbers may focus on the various sections of the site, such as sales.
8. CREATE WEBSITE VALUE
Regardless of whether a website is designed to sell a product or to accomplish some other task, in order to get visitors to take any type of action, they need to be convinced that doing so imparts some type of value for them. A website redesign project that can help visitors solve problems by offering some type of solution that fulfills the customer's needs will prevail over one that simply lists benefits or features.
Marketing companies frequently illustrate the creation of customer value as a series of steps that convert raw inputs into finished services and goods. Value is created for website visitors when the webmaster adds unique services, features and benefits with each step in the redesign project.
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