Foundations for Website Redesign
Companies redesign there website all the time and is potentially one of the most dangerous things you can do to your website, redesign can kill your SEO and organic search rankings if you are not careful. Because the visual appeal of your website is not the most important thing to pay attention to during a website redesign.
The Wrong Reasons for a Redesign
- We have a new corporate look and feel
- I'm tired of the old website
- It's been 12 months since the last design
- The CEO wants to do it
The Right Reasons for a Redesign
- Get found by more prospects
- Convert more prospects into leads and customers
Websites should attract prospects using inbound marketing by creating great content that is optimised for search (SEO) and well promoted using social media to get found in more places. Content is what drives visitors to your website and search engines really like fresh content people like fresh content and having more and more content on your site increases your chances of getting search engine traffic.
Publish Everything
- Blogs
- Pod casts
- Videos
- Photos
- Presentations
- Events
- News Releases
Websites Should Produce Measurable ROI
All websites need landing pages to enable engagement, these calls to action should be at the bottom of every blogs article, your homepage, you should have them everywhere using analytics to measure the results.
Landing Page Uses
- Call to action on website homepage
- Links in all emails, newsletters
- Use for all pay-per-click ads
- Next step after trade shows, courses, events
A redesign without measurable improvements is a waste of time and you should think about benchmarking at the very beginning of the website redesign process, start from what the website is doing today. Get found, convert and analyse
Tips for a Successful Website Redesign Process
Audit your website then protect your key assets when remodelling your website. Protect inbound links, content and keyword rankings do not screw them up during the redesign process or you will get a drop in traffic. Before you put pencil to paper and choosing the colour scheme do you know?
- How many pages do you have?
- How many pages will go away?
- Will pages move to a new URL?
- How many new pages will you create?
- What is your most popular content?
- How many inbound links do I have?
- Will links outside of your website still link to the right pages?
- What keywords do I rank for?
- What keywords do my competitors rank for?
- What keywords should I rank for?
- What generates most of my leads?
- What are my best conversion tools?
- How can I increase conversions?
If you are changing domains or website structure make sure you use a 301 redirect to identify all URLs with assets and keep this content on the new site. The 301 redirect will route your old URL to the new URL maintaining existing pages SEO characteristics.
Spend resources on creating content more than beautiful design and be in control of your website not the other way round. So if you’re used to using an outside firm to change some content, change some images, your website is controlling you and that's not good. Any time you need a third party to make small medium changes to your website that's a bad situation to be in because today what is important about being successful on line is the ability to publish lots of content and adapt rapidly to what is happening on line and change your website quickly.
Use a CMS
There are lots of content management systems out there I develop websites using Sitefinity to simply create content, news, blogs, events, edit, roll back, version tracking, multi user workflows protected by roles and permissions, analytic integration with one of the most intuitive non technical interfaces on the market place. If you are constantly evolving and changing your website then Sitefinity will put you in full control at a non technical level
A CMS with a blog engine also gives you the ability to create lots of content on an ongoing basis and companies that blog have over 400% more pages in Google. This is good because you will have more inbound links into your website that drive traffic enabling you to rank higher in search engines so blogs do help your SEO strategy.
Make it Easy to Run Conversion Experiments
Were back on the topic of landing pages and what makes a successful landing page, typically making the layout page relatively clear and simple, putting the form high on the page so people can find it and see it are basics for getting the most out of your landing page. What you also want to do for landing pages and conversion elements on your website is track what you are doing and then experiment in order to get better results. Sitefinity includes a form builder for dynamic form creation and stores the information in the back end database allowing you to experiment as quickly as you can and as often as you can getting results faster. Sitefinity form builder retains results even after fields have been removed from past responses guaranteeing measurable experiments. If you had to put up a new landing page on your website with a new form this afternoon could you do it? an you launch a landing page in 15 to 20 minutes, what is the cost of your experimentation? Sitefinity provides this functionality in a non technical interface making it possible to experiment more often with measurable results to see how forms and pages are performing.
Make it Easy to Measure Results
Avoid paralysis by analysis don't measure everything, simple is better than complicated and should only focus on a few metrics. In business this would be Visitors leads and sales, for visitors I would want to know how many people are visiting the site, where are they coming from, how many are converting to leads and how many of those leads are converting into sales. If you know these results from your website then as a marketing or business person you have the fundamental analysis. Measure where visitors are coming from whether its social networking sites, organic search, paid search or email campaigns you'll then be able to make informed decisions.
Website Redesign Summary
Keys to a successful website
- Get Found: attract website visitors
- Convert: visitors to leads and leads to sales
- Analyse: Produce measurable ROI
Tips for website redesign
- Audit your website then protect your assets
- Spend resources on creating content, much more than beautiful design
- Make it easy to run conversion experiments quickly and easily
- Make sure it's easy to measure results
How to Put All This Together
Sitefinity comes highly recommended to ensure that your website will be perfectly tailored for your unique needs in one easy installation. For more detailed information visit Sitefinity and let me know if you have any questions contact me.