There are many ways a website redesign can go wrong – and usually the design pros will point to things like slow page loads or too little content before the jump. Marketing consultants, however, have other considerable snafus to avoid. Here are the biggest offenders.
SEO Snafu #1: Forgetting Your Old Website
Just because your current website needs a redesign is no reason to discount the successes of design housed in your current one. Marketing consultants who leave out 301 redirects are shooting themselves in the foot – de facto starting over to gain ground in the rankings.
Building off of that idea, don’t forget how the hierarchical navigation leverages SEO in your current site – in fact, you might want to skip redoing the navigation altogether. If you’ve spent any amount of time and money to gain ground in SEO rankings, be careful not to muck it up as you plod ahead with your website redesign.
SEO Snafu #2: Putting SEO Off Until Later
So many companies put their website redesign first and do their SEO work later. Sure, SEO shouldn’t be the only reason you’re going through a website redesign, but it shouldn’t be an afterthought either. From content to design, SEO should be thoughtfully and meticulously integrated into your new site.
If you do the SEO research prior to the website redesign, you’ll know what sort of content will perform for you and what you’ll need to write in order to get traffic from search engines. Inbound marketing and SEO strategies always go hand in hand. Remember, no matter how beautiful, highly functional and even memorable your website is, if no one can find it on the web – does it really exist at all?
SEO Snafu #3: Optimizing For Impossible Keywords
Marketing consultants who agree to optimize your newly redesigned web page for generic and common words like “leadership”, “investments” or “electronics” – you know the ones for your specific niche – are marketing consultants you should run and hide from. There’s no way you’ll be able to compete with the likes of behemoth firms in your sphere, much less About.com, Wikipedia, eHow and on and on. Sure, there are a lot of keywords our there. Deciding which to choose involves getting inside the minds of your target audience.
This can be as simple as talking with your customers directly, or taking to the web and finding out what people in your “world” are talking about on social media. Balance these buzzwords and jargon with branded terms and long tail keywords that speak to ideal customers who know exactly what they’re looking for (when they’re looking to find a product or service like yours). This broad based strategy will take you much farther than trying to rank on “popular” keys.