Website Redesign: 10 Important Points to Keep in Mind

1. Have Defined Marketing Goals

The first step is to define marketing goals that will form the foundation of the redesign project. Regardless of whether you wish to use your website to generate sales, for lead generation, or to provide customer support, you need to have clear goals. In addition, you should be able to track your goals for website redesign 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 out 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 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 many visitors who visit a page leave almost immediately. This might be because of inappropriate content, content that is not appealing to your target audience, or content that your website’s visitors don’t 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.

You should carry out the process of establishing KPIs and tracking them before redoing your website. This is because they assist in the effective comparison of data and the subsequent setting of website redesign goals.

2. Know Your Target Audience

People often think it is a good idea to define their target audience broadly because they see no sense in excluding 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 content when redesigning a website.

4. Search Engine Optimization

Phantom, Pirate, Hummingbird, Pigeon, Panda, Possum, and Penguin; Google has continuously released algorithm updates. The aim of these updates is typically to reward websites that provide relevant content. As a result, you need to ensure that your website is on the list of ones that find favor with Google.

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 making things harder for publishers and friendlier for end-users.

Now, SEO is about following different practices to ensure 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 keyword selection process, it is crucial that you choose one primary keyword for each page of your website. You may 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. However, what helps is that you may take advantage of Google Search Console (formerly Webmasters) to find the terms Google considers relevant.

5. Explainer Videos Can Help

Digital marketers’ reliance on images and text to tell their stories through websites is on the wane. Now, you get an easier way of explaining things through videos.

Explainer videos are popular because they work well. If you have a professionally produced video with a great script and visuals that engages your audience and captures 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 enable you 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 search engine rankings.

6. Responsive Design vs. Mobile-Friendly

After you redesign your website, it should look good and function well on different types of devices and screen sizes. There are two ways to achieve desired results, which include mobile and responsive web design.

Mobile-Friendly Design

The more affordable option of the two is to create a mobile-friendly website. If you take this path, 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.

Responsive Design

If more than 35% of your website’s visitors access it 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 seamlessly adapt to the environment. Images, texts, and other elements resize and realign depending on the screen size in question. Unnecessary images hide out of sight when a visitor uses a rather small screen.

7. Analytics Utilization

One of the key benefits of website redesign is that you can use data from your existing website to develop a more effective strategy. This is where Google Console and Google Analytics, both free and highly assistive tools, can be particularly beneficial. It is important to start tracking your existing website before the redesign process, as this gives you the means to identify aspects that need your attention.

Google Console

Google Console is great when it comes to 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 based on high-value keywords.

Google Analytics

You may track KPIs using Google Analytics. These should be the same KPIs you define before starting the website redesigning process. Among other benefits, these tools can also assist in tracking your marketing campaigns.

8. Marketing Automation

One of the things to consider when redesigning a website is 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

Website redesigning might include the elimination of outdated pages. Consider this – a visitor gets to a page on your website through a legacy URL, only to find a 404 error. This probably means you have lost that visitor for good, which is bad for business. A good solution to this problem is to get your website redesigning company to redirect all legacy URLs to new pages with relevant content.

Alternatively, you may do it on your own. 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 the appropriate pages.

10. Conversion Path Optimization

While the first step in the process involves defining website redesign goals, launching a website does not mean the process is over. Once the website is live and you start receiving traffic to various pages, you need to ensure optimizing conversion paths. This process involves making alterations to landing pages to increase website visitors.

When you think along the line of conversion paths, you get the opportunity to change parts of your 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 change of around one percent can have a huge impact on the results, and this is something the best website redesign projects manage to achieve.

Conclusion

Now you know the most important elements that need your attention during the website redesign process, you stand a better chance of producing desired results. However, taking a look at the mistakes you need to avoid is equally important. This will ensure that your website is attractive, it engages its visitors, and it drives them to perform desired actions.