If you’ve made the decision to revamp your website, you’ll definitely be eager to get started. What are your reasons for revamping the website? Which ones of the ones below is true for you?
- Your current website does not represent your business, and a lot of content needs to change
- The designs are old and I am looking for a more contemporary design
- I am not achieving my objectives in terms of SEO, so I need to revamp
- My menu structure and navigations have become outdates, so I need a revamp
- My clients are providing me feedback that my website needs to change
- My employees feel that my website is very old fashioned
A website revamp may be able to achieve several or all of the above things for you. It will give you the freshness that you are looking for, besides helping your SEO strategy and presenting you professionally in front of your customers and prospects. Find out How to drive 10x traffic to your website
It’s incredible to picture a completely revamped website. A website revamp, however, should never be hurried. Here is an essential checklist that you cannot miss before you begin your plan for a website revamp.
1. What are your company’s objectives?
Spend some time thinking about the main goals your website should achieve for your business and the range of website enhancements. Sales and lead generation are priorities for many. Others are concerned about branding and visibility. Before you venture into a revamp project list down some of your main objectives in terms of quantifiable analytics, so that you can plan several of your initiatives around these objectives.
2. Map it for your target market.
Choosing your target audience is crucial when redesigning your website. Ideally, who are you talking to in terms of content, graphics, layouts. If you can define this persona, then this can define the graphics you design, the layouts you opt for and the tone of content across the website. For e.g. a gaming website will have a very different tone, colors, graphics than a formal bank website, which appeals to a very different audience.
3. Check your numbers
Look into the details of the current traffic, leads produced, pages indexed, content, keywords, and inbound links. The objective is to create a baseline so you can evaluate the effectiveness of your redesign later on and to identify important keywords and content to bring over so you don’t lose your ranking position once the new site has been published.
4. What are your competitors doing?
Analyze the top ten competitors in your industry. What do you like on their websites? Are there ideas that you would like to implement on your website? What keywords are they optimized for? Do you need to change the keywords focus for your website?
Your website redesign company may help you understand why a competitor’s website is superior to yours by conducting thorough analysis as part of its provision of total website overhaul services. Utilize competitive analysis to make your business website superior to the competition. Redesign your website to provide better options, load more quickly, and be easier to navigate.
5. Content is king – No different in website redesigning
Even the most beautiful visual design or easy navigation will be useless without the right content. When making website upgrades, you might have to look at several types and kinds of content. Talk about taxonomies and how you’ll connect pages to improve user engagement. During the redesign phase, collaborate with content teams to create and improve the quality of content of your web pages (especially for the home page and product pages).
The basis of a strong website is its content. Make sure that you are able to satisfy different user journeys like awareness, consideration and decision making with your content. Your call to actions have to be judiciously placed to aid the conversion that you are looking for.
6. SEO tactics
Another crucial component of a website redesign is search engine optimization (SEO). Use tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, or MOZ to see how your web pages rank and for which keywords. Make sure your metadata (such as title tags) are well-designed if you don’t want to lose visitors. For instance, if you sell design software and your main page ranks in Google for the term “design software,” you should keep that keyword in your meta-data and copy. One of the best ways to increase traffic to your website is through link development. Explore some effective SEO link-building tools that can help you raise your website’s ranking.
7. Plan on integrating conversion tools on web pages
A website is not rebuilt purely for aesthetic or branding reasons. Lead or inquiry generation is also an important objective of the website.
There are several ways, you can capture user’s interest, while he is at a page. The simplest way is to use inline banners, or graphic boxes to highlight what else you can offer to him. You can also plant links at the right spots, so that the user stays engaged. A conversion form is the simplest way to get a user to submit data. A contact us sticky is also a good way to allow the user to contact you from anywhere on the page.
Some other conversion tools that you can use include pop-ups and chatbot. These can be configured in a way, that they do not create a nuisance for the user and rather help him with what he is looking for.
Read more about 7 things to consider while building a lead generation friendly website
8. Having a simple to understand menu structure & navigation
If a person lands at your website, it should be easy for him to go to wherever he wants to go. Having a simple menu structure and navigation will help this. Also, while you design the menu structure, make sure that you go in for a sticky menu, so that it stays on top, no matter what. Also, no matter what you have in the menu, have all the important links in your footer as well. This helps user navigation immensely. Implementing breadcrumbs on each individual pages also helps a user understand where he is on the website and what does he need to do to go back to some specific page.
9. Plan for intelligent interlinking of pages and blogs
All of us have to think on behalf of the user that is visiting our page. If he visits a particular page, then how can you serve him more content that is similar and would be interesting for him/her to check out. This is what you can achieve by intelligent interlinking of blogs and pages. If a person comes to a page through organic search and then he also visits a few other pages because of the interlinking done, then that helps reduce bounce ratio and in turn helps your search terms to rank better on Google.
10. Have a robust testing plan
Once your website is ready and you are all set to launch, make sure that you do extensive testing. Make sure that you test the pages for different resolutions, different browsers and for different mobile devices. Nowadays there are tools available which will help you do this and you should be able to optimize the website for these different resolutions, browsers and mobile devices.
Teams should have a clear understanding of their goals before beginning to carry out the website redesign plan. Together with your team, develop a plan for redesigning the website. To make the process much easier, you can also work with a website redesign business like Xenia Consulting that offers website refurbishment and website revamp services.
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