You might want to redesign your website for various reasons such as to provide a refreshed look and feel, add several new features, deliver new information, etc. However, you should use this exercise to optimize your website to tackle increased competition and should engage the services of a professional SEO team.
Your refreshed website should strive to please major search engines and your target audience to result in improved rankings and repeat business from satisfied users. Here are a few tips that should be considered when you redesign your website.
Your first option would be to decide if you need to shift to a better platform to provide new and improved features to your market. You can opt for extremely cost-effective content management systems such as Magento, Joomla, Drupal, etc., that can be customized easily to suit your needs. If you are ready to spend more then the IBM Websphere Commerce platform also offers several SEO features that can be exploited to your advantage.
Once you have decided on a robust, user-friendly, and cost-effective platform, then you can engage in keyword research and conduct competitive analysis. You can use the Google AdWords Tool to make sure that you collect free and paid keywords that best suit your business model, and provide optimum ROI in the shortest possible time.
You can begin your search for quality keywords and do a competitive analysis with a Google search for keywords targeted by you. You can then seek out the top 10 ranked sites and use the “site:www.example.com” search over Google to check on the number of pages indexed for these sites. In addition, using the “allintext:keyword site:www.example.com” search will help you find out specific topics and keywords indexed by you or your competitor.
You can then use tools such as SEMRush, among others to find out the keywords that are attracting traffic to your top competitors’ sites and find out how those keywords are used in their sites. This exercise will help you gain insight into the strategy employed by your competitors and help you optimize your own website for similar or improved rankings.
You can also explore the idea of adding a blog section to your website, or collect reviews and suggestions from your clients, or select from other strategies to enhance your website value and presence on the internet. This exercise should be based on your business model and should definitely help to improve user experience.
Your next step in the redesign process should be to examine how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are actually displaying the content of each webpage. In addition, your URL structure should also be analyzed to make sure that there are no bottlenecks in the logical flow of your website. Since users make increasing use of tablets and mobile phones to access websites, you will need to ensure that your website is optimized to perform smoothly on these devices in addition to desktops and laptops too.
Your URL structure should be uniform and should include a trail during the design process so as to help locate problems, if any, in the future. You should also create a 301 redirect for every webpage that has shifted from the old to the new site in case the URL structure has been modified. In addition, make sure to incorporate a login password for the staging version of your website. This will inform major search engines that your redesigned website requires fresh indexing, which in turn will provide improved rankings, especially if you have completed the above exercise.
The above tips will not only help you redesign your website with enhanced features, but will also encourage search engines to push you up the rankings chart. Hire an efficient SEO team and implement these tips with their co-operation for visible improvement in rankings and user experience.
