If your business revolves around your website, a meticulously formulated and implemented website redesign project will have a noticeable impact on boosting web traffic. What’s important, though, is to ensure that the effect is positive in all aspects.
Here are the top 10 points to consider when redesigning a website, and you may use this simplified guide to go through your website redesign project. Alternatively, if revamping a website is not your cup of tea, using the services of a reputed website redesign company might be in your best interest.
1. Have Defined Marketing Goals
The first step is to define marketing goals that will form the foundation of the redesign. Regardless of whether you wish to use your website to generate sales, for lead generation, or to provide customer support, you need to have goals. In addition, you should be able to track your goals using key performance indicators (KPIs).
Conversion rate is among the most important KPIs because it shows how the relationship changes over time. When a user fills a contact form and becomes a sales lead, it is an important event. The main aim is to ensure that the visitors to your website take actions that are geared towards benefiting your business. The most important conversion actions include signing up for newsletters, downloading marketing documents, and purchasing products.
It is important to use supplementary KPIs for purposes of tracking the performance of a website. For instance, paying attention to the bounce rate is crucial because when this number is high, it means there are many visitors who visit a page and leave almost immediately. This might be as a result of inappropriate content, content that is not appealing to your target audience, or content that it does not find useful/relevant. Other important KPIs include the average number of pages visitors view per session and the average time they spend on the site.
One should carry out the process of establishing KPIs and tracking them before redoing a website because they assist in the effective comparison of data and the subsequent setting of goals.
2. Know Your Target Audience
In most cases, people think it is a good idea to define their target audience broadly. However, it does not make sense to exclude any potential business. A possible downside to taking this approach is that while you try to include everyone, you might end up pleasing no one. The last thing you want is a revamped website that reads like anonymous letters from a company.
The idea is to make a website read like a love letter to your audience. It is important to get into the shoes of your probable and existing customers. You need to understand what motivates them, what they are interested in, and what they are looking for. Your website needs to speak with them in a language they understand and make everything straightforward.
Good digital marketers create different profiles for their target customers and ensure that these profiles describe their needs, motivations, and interests. While this might appear like hard work, it comes with significant long-term benefits.
Keep in mind that you should focus on middle-level management when you are selling to corporations because they are responsible for making decisions that affect their companies’ choices.
3. Provide Relevant Content
The main reason why a single company can dominate search engine result pages is content relevance. From the point of view of search engines, relevancy indicates that users end up finding the information they seek.
Simply put, relevant content is what your intended audience will find useful. This is why you need to put in the required effort to identify and understand your target audience. What follows should be content that represents their needs. Ensuring that you get into your target customers’ heads to understand what they want or need is crucial.
Know why and how visitors get to your website, the problems they are looking to solve, the complications caused by the problems, how you can solve the problems in a unique way, and how they will feel when you solve those problems.
The bounce rate of your website is a good indicator of whether or not your content is relevant. The higher the bounce rate, the more irrelevant the content, and the converse holds true as well. This is because the bounce rate increases or decreases based on the number of visitors who visit your site and leave as soon as they get there.
Good content marketing can help boost business by lowering bounce rates and increasing conversion rates. This is good for your website and great for your business. This is why it is important to work on your profile and the website content.
4. Search Engine Optimization
Phantom, Pirate, Hummingbird, Pigeon, and Panda – Google has continuously released algorithm updates. These updates are aimed at rewarding websites with relevant content. As a result, you might want to ensure you are on the list of websites that Google rewards.
Not very long ago, search engine optimization (SEO) was all about playing the system, but things have changed significantly after Google’s many algorithm updates. The plays and games no longer work because these algorithm updates keep getting meaner for publishers and friendlier for end-users.
Today, SEO is about following different practices with the aim of ensuring that Google and other search engines can easily understand your content. A competent website designer will incorporate these practices when handling a redesign project.
Keyword research is the other important part of SEO. There are a number of tools made available online that you may use to conduct keyword research and identify the terms that match the motivations and interests of the audience you are targeting.
During the keywords selection process, it is crucial that you choose one primary keyword for each page of your website. You can then optimize the page by using the keyword in the URL, title, and throughout the content on the page. Using the selected keyword for off-page optimization is also important.
The exact or best way of optimizing a webpage is debatable because Google does not provide information on how it ranks websites. What helps, though, is that you may take advantage of Google Search Console (formerly Webmasters) to find the terms Google considers relevant.
5. Explainer Videos Can Help
Days when people used to rely on images and text to tell their stories through websites are long gone. Now, you get an easier way of explaining things through videos.
Explainer videos are popular because they actually work. If you have a well-produced video with a great script and visuals, engaging your audience and capturing its attention, you’re definitely on the right track. Videos give you the ability to explain what you are all about in a way that appeals to your audience.
Videos also give you the ability to showcase the personality of your brand, and this is a good way to ensure that viewers retain the information they consume. Besides, videos can help in increasing conversion rates and achieving higher ranks on Google.
6. Responsive Design vs. Mobile-Friendly
Once the process of revamping a website is complete, it should appear attractive on different screens. There are two ways to achieve desired results, which include mobile and responsive web design.
The more affordable option of the two is to create a mobile-friendly website. This simply means that your website will work the same way regardless of the size of the screen in use. Your content will scale to fit smaller screens, which requires that you use lightweight images. Since features such as drop-down menus might not work well on mobile devices, you’ll need to eliminate them during the website redesign process.
If more than 35% of your visitors access your site using mobile devices, it’s in your best interest to spend a little more money and opt for a responsive design. Websites that make use of responsive designs adapt to the environment in a seamless manner. Images, texts, and other elements will resize and realign depending on the screen size in question. Unnecessary images get hidden when a screen being used is too small.
7. Analytics Utilization
You should at least use Google Search Console and Google Analytics. These tools are free and highly assistive. It is important to start tracking your website before the redesign process so as to identify things that need your attention.
Google Search Console becomes particularly important with search engine optimization. Once the website redesign process is complete, you should check the keywords for which you are performing well after a few months. You may then continue with the optimization of pages that are underperforming. You can also introduce new pages that are based on high-value keywords.
You can track KPIs using Google Analytics. These should be the same KPIs you define prior to starting the website redesigning process. Among other benefits, these tools can also assist in tracking your marketing campaigns.
8. Marketing Automation
As you plan the redesign of your website, you need to decide on whether you need to invest in marketing automation. While some of the automation tools might cost a tidy sum, investing in them is typically worth every cent because of the benefits they bring to the table.
Good marketing automation vendors provide comprehensive toolkits that give marketers an easy way to plan, coordinate, manage and measure their various marketing efforts – online as well as offline. Normally, these vendors give you tools that help in building and tracking landing pages, assist in growing email lists, and a host of other benefits.
9. Forwarding of Existing URLs
Revamping a website might include the elimination of outdated pages. This unfortunate event involves a visitor arriving through a legacy link, only to be welcomed by a 404 error page. This probably means you have lost that visitor for good, and it is definitely bad for business.
A good solution to this problem is the redirection of all legacy URLs to existing pages that have been redesigned and contain relevant content.
How you may do this is relatively simple. Start with a map that lists your existing website’s content in its entirety. List all the URLs. If you are eliminating any of the pages during the redesign process, you may use server-side 301 redirects to good effect. This will help in sending visitors to appropriate pages.
10. Conversion Path Optimization
The first step in the website redesign process involves defining marketing goals. However, simply launching a website does not mean that the process is over. Once the website is live and you start receiving traffic to various pages, you will need to ensure that the conversion paths are optimized. This process is geared towards making alterations to landing pages with the aim of increasing website visitors.
When you think along the line of conversion paths, you get the opportunity to change other parts of the website that bring visitors to various landing pages. The optimization of conversion paths is part voodoo and part science, which is why this particular skill set is in high demand. In most cases, even a 1% change or less can have a huge impact on the results you get.
CONCLUSION
Now you know the 10 most important elements that you need to pay attention to when redesigning your website, you stand a better chance of producing desired results. However, knowing the mistakes you need to avoid when redesigning a website is equally important. This will ensure that your website is attractive, it keeps the visitors glued to the content, and it converts visitors to customers.
Originally posted in: https://www.topnotchdezigns.com/website-redesign-10-important-points-to-keep-in-mind/
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