A website redesign can be a huge undertaking, involving hundreds of technical, financial, creative, operational, and strategic decisions to consider. From planning your goals to building your site from scratch, it can take months of planning, design, writing, and development before you can show the world your masterpiece.
One of the keys to ensuring a smooth start is making sure your website speaks search engine language, or search engine optimization (SEO). How do you make sure that any SEO value you created with your old website is not only preserved but also optimized for your new website? Here are 14 SEO freelancer mistakes you should avoid when redesigning your website.
The first mistake: the redesign is aimless
Before you start designing or planning your content, you should ask yourself:
What are the main goals and objectives of this new website?
If you plan to use your website to generate leads, your content and user experience should align with your conversion funnels, helping your visitors convert into leads. This is an essential component of an in-house marketing program. To find potential clients, you will need to raise awareness by increasing your traffic. That means more blogging, premium content creation, social engagement, and creating reasons for people to keep coming back. There is no one-size-fits-all website. When discussing the redesign with your team, keep the following key elements in mind:
The goal of the redesign: What will success look like in three to six months?
People: Who are your ideal customers? Depending on your business, you may have several types of ideal prospects.
The Buyer's Journey: What are the key stages a potential customer goes through when deciding to purchase a product like yours?
Key elements: What features and components should be in place to help us achieve our goals?
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The second mistake: not defining the criteria
Now that you've made the decision to redesign your site, you need to create metrics based on the performance of your old website. These analytics metrics can be found on HubSpot or Google Analytics and will help you set goals for the new site, as well as overall business growth.
Types of criteria include:
Site time, overall traffic, average banner click rates - are of particular interest to B2B publishers who invest on the basis of ad revenue.
Sales conversion visitors for a specific product - A B2C company may only be interested in converting visitors into customers, and the entire user experience focuses on this instantly.
Lead generation - A service-based organization may be more interested in generating leads for its sales team, thus spending more time educating and raising awareness outside of its brand.
From an SEO company patna perspective, to maintain the balance of your engagement and whatever value you've created in your current niche, you'll need to measure at least these metrics:
Total traffic (from organic searches, referrals, etc.)
Conversion rates (ideally every step between traffic and customers)
Pages that get organic traffic (usually set with the best keywords)
Usage metrics (geography, bounce rate, time on site, etc.)
Inbound links (sites that link to you)
The third mistake: choosing the wrong content management system and hosting provider
A correct content management system (CMS) is perhaps the most important factor for a website. Depending on your new site's scope, you'll need to evaluate cost, functionality, support, security, reliability, and speed.
Some of the CMS features you should look for to ensure a fully optimized website are:
Responsive Design - The website should run smoothly on any computer, tablet, mobile device or browser. Google specifically describes this as an SEO signal.
Function: Does your CMS allow you to tweak your website and add the right meta tags or the rich design that search engines Digital martketing in india use to understand the design, context and content of your website?
Analytics: Does your content management system allow you to add analytics functionality or does it have built-in analytics functionality? It's important to be able to easily track traffic, leads, bounce rates, site time, and user flows, and create personalized reports to answer specific marketing questions.