1. Take the time to set meaningful goals for your website. Is your site meant to generate leads, sales, be informational or all of the above?
Your website has a larger impact your business than ever before, and a redesign should be considered not because you are tired of the design but because your want to increase its value as an essential part of your sales, marketing and business development strategy. Spend time planning the business goals for the website. Is that goal more visitors, leads and customers or is the site to educate and inform customers? Every decision you make should be focused on improving those goals. With clear goals in mind, you can spend less time worrying about the color of the background, and more time worrying about things that will improve your results.
2. Preserve your assets. “If it ain’t broke don’t…”
There is no shortage of ways a website redesign can have a negative impact. Your existing website has assets that you have built up. These assets help your prospects find your website and help you turn them into leads and customers. You need to find out what those assets are (great content, keywords you rank for, inbound links to individual pages, conversion tools) and protect them carefully during the redesign. Many “web design experts” get this wrong. They are design experts not Internet marketing experts.
3. Spend resources on great content not unique design.
There are more than a billion pages on the internet. One of them has a design that will work great for your website. Copy it! The design should be good but the content should be great.
4. Create content regularly.
For many marketers, this is the toughest one. Enlist everyone in your company to contribute. Record presentations, update collateral and product docs, video your presentations, trade shows, speaking gigs and of course blog! The search engines like content, the more the better. A larger site, based on the number of pages, will outrank a smaller site in the search engines almost all the time. If you have more content, on average you will have more website visitors and grow your business faster. Tweak existing content to keep it fresh, you don’t always have to create content from scratch, update and leverage older content. So, build a strategy to continue to add more and more content to your website over time.
5. Plan for upfront for SEO
In many cases how the search engines find you or Search Engine Optimization is an afterthought and it should not be. Plan upfront to make your web pages search friendly and carefully research and select your keywords. Build sections around your keywords and remember more pages are better.
6. Include a blog, RSS and Video
Any website redesign should include these basics in the upfront planning of the new site. They are must have items for a successful website and it has never been easier to incorporate these elements. A blog is a great way to create content on an ongoing basis, and to start to converse with your customers and establish you and your company as subject matter experts. RSS allows new content from your website to be automatically pushed out to other websites and people, increasing the reach of your brand.
7. Plan your Landing Pages
Landing pages are the page people are directed to when you want them to take an action such as registering, buying something, signing up for an offer. Designing good landing pages that are clean and direct your visitors to take the desired action is critical; to meeting your goals.
8. Plan for conversion testing.
The key to driving your conversion rate and the number of leads you get from your website over time is to constantly improve the effectiveness of your conversion tools – this usually means your landing pages. If you build a completely static website and have to go to a consultant or IT person each and every time you want to set up a new landing page or to change an existing page, you might be limiting your ability to quickly experiment and improve. I am a believer that some sort of system that lets you edit content and build landing pages without having to know coding is a good idea.
7. Monitor, Analyze and Tweak, Tweak Tweak.
We have come full circle. If the goal was to increase visitors and conversions, then that is the metric we should track. What does this mean? It means if the CEO hates the new design, tell her to go pound sand and show her your improved lead conversion metrics. If your creative director says he loves the new design, ask him to explain why you are now getting fewer leads and why you should not change the website back to the old one.
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for a free website evaluation email dave@d4bmarketing.com
