Marketing consultants make a lot of their earnings redesigning their clients’ websites. In fact, according to a Hubspot 2013 Website Redesign Report, most companies perform a website redesign every six months to two years. That’s a lot of time and money spent – and it’s not always with good reason. Here are some of the worst reasons marketing consultants conjure up to redesign a website.
1. Boredom.
Remember, you might visit your website a lot – but that doesn’t mean your customers do. You might be bored with it, but your customers might be used to it. And consider this: your current customers know how to use your website to find what they need. Will a redesign turn them off? Proceed with caution unless your personal level boredom reflects that of your most important asset: your customer.
2. Because the client asked for it.
Marketing consultants who value their clients’ reputations and their client relationships won’t simply go ahead with a website redesign for the simple fact that it was requested. Responsible marketing consultants will treat their clients’ money and requests with all seriousness and will advise according to actual necessity.
After all, it can cost $10,000 and upwards of $40,000 for a large business to completely overhaul an existing website. If the existing website is performing well, make sure the client is aware of the cost benefit analysis (or lack thereof) of a redesign.
3. Keeping up with the Joneses.
Whether it’s trying to puff up a page to make a small company look as though it could compete with the big guys or if it’s simply because the direct competition recently underwent a website redesign all their own, these are just excuses and not necessarily reasons to overhaul a perfectly good website. While it’s a good idea to keep an eye on what the other guy is doing, it’s important not to get too obsessive about it.
4. To improve SEO.
Website redesigns to increase web traffic are the most popular of them all. Leads and sales come from traffic, so if you build it right, they will come – right? Right? Well, sure – but that doesn’t mean you have to build an entire website around this idea.
A professional marketing consultant will admit that it’s not just about increasing the amount of good traffic – it’s about creating a website with a solid and purposeful content foundation. Besides, what’s the point of drawing more traffic if your site doesn’t have what it needs to convert them into customers?