Table of Contents

Introduction

Landing pages create the first layer where the user interacts with your site. So their role in pushing the potential consumer to make the final purchase is crucial. The point of origin can be anything – an ad or a social post but it is the destination page that decides the fate of your strategy.

To help you out, we offer you this guide to crafting great landing pages-

Design

To ensure that your landing page converts your visitors, it is essential that you focus on the design aspect of it. Since that’s the first element any visitor encounters, it should have the ability to catch the attention of your potential user.

A study by Ion Interactive reveals that people form an impression in 1/120th of a second. This data clearly reveals the necessity of gripping the user with an appealing design. So here’s what you should do to have a user-friendly design:

• Keep your design simple and try to keep a few elements so the site looks clutter-free.
• Make sure you choose a responsive design for your site so the user experience is good no matter what device he uses to access it.

Source

Content

Your landing page should be able to grasp your visitor’s attention quickly. For that to happen, your content should have a high engagement value. So when you are crafting your landing page, make sure to invest in visual content. Visuals, especially videos, help increase engagement, and boost conversions.

CTA

Call to action is the actionable element in a landing page that ultimately takes the user to complete the desired action. For crafting great landing pages, the CTA should be compelling. Take, for instance, this copy by Copyhackers. With “We build a million-dollar business on blogging”, they catch your attention and then move on to accomplishing their goal – in this case – building their email list.

Source

Closing thoughts

When landing pages are designed, it is essential to keep the user at the core of your strategy and build your plan around it. Once you understand your user’s perspective, the design, CTA, and content should emerge from that foundation so they work together to enhance buyer’s journey.

FAQs

Table of Contents

• What is SEO Web Design?
• Best Practices For SEO-Friendly Web Design
• Best Practices for Mobile SEO
  • Analyze site speed
  • Make navigation buttons more explicit
  • Make content legible without magnifying
  • Provide automatic sign-in
  • Add jump links
  • Add alt text to images
  • Ensure your content fits the screen
  • Keep the pages lightweight
  • Use HTML5 to code
  • Provide a click-to-call button
  • Keep the website architecture/navigation simple
• Best Practices to Design Website Architecture
  • Keep it simple
  • Add internal links
  • Opt for flat architecture
  • Add category pages
  • Use site links
  • Keep web pages limited
  • Web pages to add to your website
• Avoid Duplicate Content
• How to Identify Duplicate Content
  • Check your content manually using Google Search
  • Find duplicate titles and meta descriptions
  • Use plagiarism tool
• How to Fix Duplicate Content
  • Remove the content completely
  • Use meta-tagging
  • Stick to one URL structure
  • Use canonical tags
  • Redirect duplicate page
• Use Canonical Versions
• Best Practices for Using a Canonical Tag
  • You must canonicalize your homepage
  • Be clear with your signals
  • Cross-domain canonicalization
  • Test dynamic tags
  • Canonicalize near-duplicates carefully
• Work on your URL
• Best SEO practices for URL
  • Hide the prefixes
  • Use HTTPS
  • Add keywords carefully
  • Use lowercase letters
  • Remove stop words
  • Separate words with a hyphen
• Focus on user experience
• How to provide a good user experience for
  users and search engines
  • Consider website usability
  • Content hierarchy
  • Accurate title
  • Natural language processing
• Make Pages Indexable
• Best Practices to Make Your Page Indexed
  • Hidden content
  • Add alt text
  • Add transcripts
  • Spot check your backend codes
• Apply schema markup
  • How to Use Schema Markup
• Improve Site Speed
• Ways to Improve Your Site Speed
  • Decrease redirects
  • Conduct image optimization
  • Optimize back codes
  • Improve server response time
  • Distribute content load using tools
• Content guide
• Information Architecture – Structure and Best
  Practices
  • Challenge your biases
  • Don’t just stick to wireframes
  • Work on the hierarchy
  • Know your IA principles
• Conclusion

What is SEO Web Design?

Often, when the question “how to design a website” is raised, logo placement, mock-up reviews, photography, and user experience are a few of the most common answers. Search engine optimization is rarely a part of the list. It is perhaps because it is an afterthought for several organizations that are designing or redesigning their websites.

Indeed, there is already enough on the plate of those designing a website to focus on SEO, but when you lay the groundwork for the website to perform well on the SERPs right from the designing stage, it will bring great returns long into the future.

Therefore, if you are just starting, designing and developing the websites for both the user and the search engines is a recommended practice. This is where SEO website design becomes relevant.

What is SEO Web Design?

SEO web design is a practice that aids in improving website traffic by making them more indexable and accessible by the search engines.

You can have an appealing website but if you are not discoverable by your users, you won’t have any traffic. SEO web design helps in making your site more visible. It is a process of ensuring your website is designed in a way that attracts both users and search engine crawlers.

There are a couple of extensive practices for you to ensure your web design is SEO-friendly. Find these practices below.

Best Practices For SEO-Friendly Web Design

Below are the key practices to keep in mind when designing the website for the search engines.

Analyze your website in an SEO browser

If you want to see your website from the point of view of the search engines, it’s best to use an SEO Browser. One of the key benefits of using an SEO browser is that it will help you be sure that your website is completely crawlable and thus, indexable.

Just a little disclaimer, when you see your website on an SEO browser, it will appear to be different than how it would look on any other browser available at your disposal. Remember, it is the search engine’s perspective, not your end user’s.

Process of using an SEO Browser

You can use the free tool named ‘SEO Browser’ for the same. This tool is perfect to see your website in HTML form.

All you have to do is go to your website and copy the URL. Paste your website link in the search bar and click on ‘Analyze’.

You will be directed to a page with your report compiled and displayed. You will now be able to see your website in the same way your search engine crawler views it.

If you have added alt texts to your images, the search engine crawler will take that into account and display it in your report. But if you have not added your alt texts yet, the boxes would be empty with the button highlighting that your alt text is missing.

If you come across elements that are not visible to you on the website, it means they are not visible to the search engine either.

You can take note of that and make sure you take the necessary actions to make them visible.

Make your website mobile-first

In recent times, we have witnessed a surge in the usage of mobile phones. Around 61% of users on the web use a mobile phone to visit and navigate websites.

Consequently, Google, the most commonly used search engine, is now shifting to the mobile-first index. This means that when a user enters a query and the search engine result page shows up, Google tailors the size of the SERPs according to the platform (the device) in use, making it easier for the user to navigate through.

To add to that, Google has also made mobile responsiveness one of the several ranking factors. Google favors those websites that are mobile-friendly. It only makes sense to ensure that your web design is mobile-first. It will help you prepare your website for both users and search engines.

Take this website by Shutterfly, for example.

This is the desktop view of the website. Since desktop offers more digital real estate, thanks to the landscape mode, the architecture of the website are stretched horizontally.

On the other hand, if you see its mobile web version, the site size has been compressed to fit the mobile screen but you can still access all the important elements of the website.
The users can easily scroll through the website and perform the desired task, irrespective of the device they are using. This offers a positive user experience that further helps in boosting your SEO.

There are a few key practices that should be taken into account when optimizing the website for mobile as well as the search engine and the user. The same is mentioned below.

Best Practices for Mobile SEO

1. Analyze site speed

The average mobile session lasts for about 72 seconds while a desktop session lasts for 150 seconds, which is more than twice. It means when a user is visiting a website from their mobile phone, they are often in a hurry, and waiting for the website to load is the last thing they want to do.

This indicates your website needs to load faster. If your website does not load within 2.5 seconds of the user clicking on the link, it needs major improvements.

There are a couple of speed test tools that you can use to test the current speed of your website. One such tool is PageSpeed Insights. All you have to do is enter your URL and you will have your website review along with the improvements that can be made.

Then, use a website auditor to analyze and identify if any of the added images or other forms of media are taking a prolonged load time.

2. Make navigation buttons more explicit

When you optimize your website for mobile, the size of the elements will get smaller. It means that if your navigation bar and buttons are not of the right size, it will be slightly challenging to access them. To add to that, touchscreens are anyway trickier to use than the mouse and a cursor.

The size of your navigation buttons should be large enough that they stand out when your user visits your website.

Also, if your navigation bar is set at the top for desktop, it’s best to shift it to the bottom. This is because when your user is done scrolling through the website and reaches the bottom, they should be able to easily go to the next page they want to visit.

3. Make content legible without magnifying

Another way to ensure your web design is prepared for mobile SEO is to use simple fonts and a large enough size of text. Your user should be able to read the content on your page without double-tapping on it or pinching it to zoom in.

To do this, you can arrange, style, and scale your text and other media according to different screen sizes by making changes to the CSS media query breakpoints, which are nothing but the points or values that designers define in CSS to ensure high resolution.

4. Provide automatic sign-in

Providing automatic sign-in is perhaps the most underrated mobile web SEO practice.

Automatic sign-in is when you offer ‘Sign-in with Google’ or other one-tap sign-in options to the users. This will offer a good user experience because adding data when using a mobile phone does get a little tedious.

It will save your users from getting frustrated.

5. Add jump links

Infinite scrolling has become a part of our day-to-day lives (thank you, Instagram!). When a user visits your mobile website, they are primarily looking for content, everything else is just secondary. And when they are in search of something, they won’t mind scrolling through infinite folds.

However, designers need to be careful when infinite scrolling is concerned to ensure it doesn’t hinder the user’s experience. One of the best ways is to add jump links wherever possible.

Jump Links allow your user to reach a particular section on the web page in an instant, without actually having to scroll up or down. This saves their time and effort while offering a good user experience.

6. Add alt text to images

Ironically, this is one of the most talked-about and yet, the most overlooked practice.

Adding alt text to your images is a great practice to boost your SEO as well as ensure your users have a good experience while navigating your website. It is a practice that can particularly benefit disabled users and make the website more accessible.

Often, the users with limited data that access the mobile web will have images blocked to minimize data consumption and also, to improve the load speed. When you add alt text, your user will be able to at least read about the picture and visualize it in their mind.

As for the search engines, they can’t read or see your image. Adding alt text helps search engine crawlers get better and more information about your website, improving the chances of your website ranking better.

7. Ensure your content fits the screen

One thing to consider during this process is the direction. We have already discussed in the example mentioned above (shutterfly.com) that the desktop has more space horizontally while the portrait/vertical direction can be seen on mobile phones.

It is the designer’s responsibility to ensure the content fits the screen. Your mobile user should not have to scroll horizontally to access a certain piece of content. It will instantly make them leave your website.

You will just have to edit a few tags and CSS style to make your website responsive and you are good to go.

8. Keep the pages lightweight

We have already discussed that you should ensure your website’s speed is fast. While a speed tool test is one way to understand the changes that can be made, another way is to avoid adding bulky ads or images to the website.

And let’s face it, no user really wants to see an ad anyway!

When you add heavy media, it can harm your user experience and the ranking on the search results. For mobile web, you should only add extremely important and relevant images.

Reduce the pixels, resize images, and use formats that are truly suitable for the web.

There is also a Web Light solution provided by Google that helps transcode your pages for those users that have a slow connection.

It improves the speed by four times and helps save data. You can majorly preserve relevant content and provide a link to the users that will direct them to the original page.

9. Use HTML5 to code

One of the crucial things to consider for your mobile website is that your content should render smoothly.

The good news is that this is possible by coding through HTML5. It is mobile-friendly and works across operating systems.

You must avoid using software that is not commonly used in mobile phones such as Flash. Such software will only add to a poor user experience.

10. Provide a click-to-call button

Inherently, mobile phones were created to make communication via calls more convenient and easy. So, adding a click-to-call button won’t be such a bad idea.

When a user uses a mobile phone to search, they often have a purchase intent.
Adding your accurate phone number with a clickable link to it will only help you improve conversions and offer a good user experience.

Making your web design mobile-friendly is among the best practices to boost your SEO and also to steer clear from any form of penalization by the search engine.

These were all the common practices that experienced designers use to make their website mobile-friendly.

11. Keep the website architecture/navigation simple

Before we get on with the details, let us first understand what website architecture is and why it is a crucial part of SEO web design.

Website Architecture is the blueprint of how your web pages are organized, structured, and linked together on your website. With the help of well-planned website architecture, you can make sure that your users and search engine crawler both can easily find what they are searching for on your website.

Interlinking your web pages allows search engine crawlers to find all the pages that are available on your website. However, if a certain web page is not linked to any other pages or is positioned several clicks away from the homepage, it will be challenging for the crawler to find and index that page.

Take a look at this sitemap below.

As you can see, there are two web pages that are accessible only after visiting several pages. T

o add to that, you can also see one of the web pages is not linked to any of the other pages on the website. It will be impossible for both the user and the search engine spider to reach here, resulting in the page not getting indexed.

Moreover, the site map is a little too complicated for the crawler to understand. Indexing such pages will be next to impossible for the bot.

Now, take a look at the simplicity of this website architecture given below.

This is the kind of website architecture that makes it easier for the search engine spiders to crawl through all of your pages and index them.

But how do you design a website architecture that is SEO-friendly? Find out the best practices to keep in mind when designing your site architecture below.

Best Practices to Design Website Architecture

1. Keep it simple

Let us start with the most basic one.

The best thing about website optimization is that you don’t have to make things complicated. On the contrary, keeping things simple is the key.

Simplicity is especially an important factor to consider for those websites with more than a thousand pages. If you have a complicated website architecture, it will have a bad impact on both your SEO and user experience.

Such interlinking makes it challenging for the user and crawler to find what they are looking for on the website. But if you have a simple architecture with a well-structured hierarchy, it will make it easy to navigate through your website.

All you have to do is steer clear of the random maps and blueprints. Always stick to the hierarchy.

2. Add internal links

Internal linking is the core of website architecture. After all, website architecture is all about navigation i.e. how your pages are organized and linked together.

That’s why you should ensure your internal linking is well-thought. For this, link your category pages to the navigation menu and then, individual pages to those category pages.

Make sure you are using HTML codes for navigation.

Also, internal link individual pages that might be related to each other. Such links are ideal from the SEO perspective as well as from the user experience perspective. It will allow your user to find and consume everything they want to know about certain topics easily.

3. Opt for flat architecture

A flat architecture is a blueprint that’s designed in such a way that the user and the crawler can reach any page on your website in four or less than four clicks.

When you have a flat architecture, the search engine spider can crawl through every single page and help make them indexable.

This in turn allows link authority to include all the web pages that are there on your website. It enables the link authority to flow from the pages that usually get plenty of backlinks, such as your homepage to the web pages that you want to rank better on the search engines.

4. Add category pages

We have already discussed how you should try and follow a hierarchy. It ensures you don’t fall into the trap of adding your new launch pages or product pages randomly. That’s where category pages are relevant.

If you are launching a new page, you can mention the same in an existing category while adding a link to the same. It will make it more visible.

Or, if you are adding several new pages, you can create a new category and link these individual new pages to that new category page.

It keeps everything organized and allows you to avoid making the web design complicated.

5. Use site links

If you search for an optimized website on Google, you will come across two things – your search result and a few additional links mentioned right under those search results. These links are the site links that appear to make the lives of the users easier.

Site links allow the users to navigate your website easily and find the information they have been looking for much more quickly.

Google makes sure to only show the relevant site links. This is another aspect where interlinking is important.

There are no specific ways for you to prepare your website for site links. It happens when your website is interlinked and authoritative.

Designing your website architecture is not as challenging as many might think. All you have to do is be straightforward and avoid roller coasters.

6. Keep web pages limited

The lesser the number of web pages, the better it will be for your SEO.

Let me explain why.

If your website has, say about a hundred pages that have relevant and optimized content, they will be much easier to handle and make changes to.

When you have several web pages, you can have several potential problems that you might have to deal with. And these could be:

• Adding duplicate content.
• Not making changes to the current content. It will lead to you sharing outdated information with your users that can frustrate them.
• Increased chances of the search engine penalizing your website.
• Displaying content that offers little to no value to the user. Basically, thin content.

Moreover, if you are adding, suppose 100,000 pages, there will be filler content. What is filler content? It is a piece stuffed with random keywords that had no relevance to the topic being talked about. This is a blackhat SEO tactic that can hamper your genuine SEO.

We are not saying you should not add web pages or resist yourself from following an exhaustive content marketing strategy. But make sure you are adding content that is relevant, fresh, and adds value to the lives of the reader.

As long as you are not adding pages that don’t serve a purpose whatsoever, Google won’t penalize your website.

Your website will be rewarded for uploading high-quality content that is unique and updated regularly.

There are a few important pages that you must include on your website. Find them below.

7. Web pages to add to your website

There are around ten pages that you should consider adding to your website. These are the pages that are a great starting point for those who are designing/redesigning their website for the first time.

• Home
• About (Brand/Team)
• Products/Services
• Portfolio or Gallery
• Blog/News
• Testimonials/Reviews
• FAQ
• Contact
• Sitemap
• Terms & Conditions (this should also include the privacy policy)

Of course, at the end of the day, it will all depend on your audience and your industry. But adding these pages makes your website look complete.

Take this website by Simply Chocolate, for example.

There are only a limited number of relevant pages, as you can see in the top right corner. This makes the website look more sophisticated and contemporary.

Avoid Duplicate Content

One thing that Google loathes over irrelevant content is duplicate content. Thus, when you are checking your website for SEO-friendliness, it’s best to make sure your website is clear of any sort of duplicate content.

It will only add to your problems.

Google makes you pay a huge penalty in case duplicate content is found on your website. Of course, your ranking will suffer. But the worst that can happen is your website’s removal from the index itself. Your business will no longer appear on the search engine result, taking away all the visibility.

You must have unique content at all times.

You might indeed have a local business spread across different locations or an eCommerce website with, say 15,000 product pages. But the same rule applies here as well.

We know it’s a task to identify and write unique things about your business like a home inspection business in New Orleans. But if you truly want Google to index your website and make it rank, you will have to work on relevant and different content for every single location page you are adding.

So, how does one identify and rectify this duplicate content issue? Let me help you out.

How to Identify Duplicate Content

Two types of identical content can be found – within your website and outside. To find duplicate content within your website, you can do the following.

1. Check your content manually using Google Search

One of the best ways to find identical content is to go for the most classic move – manual search.

Here, all you have to do is find the page or blog that you would like to check for duplicate content. Copy a few sentences from that page/blog and paste them into the search option of the search engine.

Make sure you add quotation marks (“”) before and after the sentence.

Once you click the search icon, you will either come across the blog or page with similar content or it’ll show no results. It will help you figure out if that particular page/blog is duplicate or unique.

2. Find duplicate titles and meta descriptions

Thanks to the introduction of digital tools, you can now easily find all the significant problems that your website might have concerning duplicate content and more.

The tool in the conversation here is called Visual SEO that received its well-deserved fame after Google decided to phase out HTML Improvements from its Google Search Console.

Visual SEO provides you with a report of all the issues related to your duplicate meta descriptions, page titles, H1 tags, and more.

Now, to find duplicate content outside your website, you can do the following.

3. Use plagiarism tool

Checking your content for plagiarism is one of the best ways to find identical content published by other websites.

Tools like Grammarly and Plagiarisma are a few of the checkers that allow you to find duplicate and scrapped content.

̧You can simply copy and paste your content or upload your file to check for content that might be similar to something that’s uploaded on other websites on the web. The tools will highlight the content that is found on other websites and also provide you with relevant resources so that you can mention proper sources.

How to Fix Duplicate Content

If you have identified duplicate content on either your website or on that of the others, don’t worry. There are ways that you can use to rectify it.

1. Remove the content completely

Of course, the easiest way to deal with a problem is to get rid of the root cause. You can submit a legal request to remove the content on other websites that is similar to yours from Google completely.There’s a page that offers legal help in case of duplicate or copyrighted content. You will be asked to choose the Google product that your request is related to. It could be a Google Search, YouTube videos, Google Ad, Google Shopping, and more.Google also gives you an option to specifically choose ‘copyright removal’, if that’s the case. You can find the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice. All you have to do is provide the URLs of the copyrighted work (both yours and the infringed links), their team will verify the same, and you’re done.You will find the result in another couple of days, which is approximately 10 days.

2. Use meta-tagging

The signals and meta robots are two items that you can keep an eye out for when in search of identical content on your website.Meta robot tags are especially useful when you don’t want a certain page(s) to get indexed and show on the SERPs.It’s quite simple. You just have to add a ‘no index’ HTML code at the backend of the page.

3. Stick to one URL structure

Various structural elements of your URL can also be the reason for the presence of duplicate content on your website. If you don’t structure your URL in a way that it has certain instructions, then, whenever you create a different URL, it will always be a different structure and page.This is something that often occurs unintentionally but it can cause major problems in your core site metrics that include rank positions or traffic.The most commonly used structures that can easily get duplicated include www. and non-www. versions, HTTP and HTTPS versions, or the versions with and without trailing slashes ( / ).To rectify, you must identify which of the structures are most commonly used on your website and stick to it. If you are redirecting, make sure the pages are directed to those URLs that you want to get indexed and have the right structure.

4. Use canonical tags

Canonical tags are the crucial HTML code that keeps your content from getting duplicated – either on your website or outside.The code signals Google that you are the owner/publisher of the content. If the same content is found on other websites, your website will be considered the ‘main version’.Canonical tags can either point to a page or away from it. Tags that point to a page signals the search engine that the other version of the content is the ‘main version’.While the other one will inform the search engine that the page itself is the main version. These are also referred to as self-referencing tags. We will discuss more on these tags later.

5. Redirect duplicate page

This means redirecting your pages. They are extremely useful during the process of eliminating duplicate content.You can simply redirect the page with duplicate content to the main version of the page. This is especially an important practice when your duplicate pages have higher traffic volumes or authority.

These are the ways you identify and fix duplicate content to save your website from getting penalized.

Use Canonical Versions

We have discussed canonical tags in brief just above. Let’s go a little deeper into this practice and understand how using the canonical version will help you with your SEO-friendly web design.

The canonical tag is an HTML code that signals Google that the page with the code ‘rel=canonical’ is the main version. This is of importance majorly when you want to upload similar content spread across various pages but you don’t want all of them to rank on the SERPs. Instead, you only want just one of those similar pages to get a better rank (or at least get indexed).

This is a code that eCommerce stores with several product pages can find extremely helpful.

Yes, you shouldn’t use the same/duplicate content on your website, but when you have the same product available in different colors, it can often tempt you to keep it the same across these same product pages.

This is where a canonical tag becomes a blessing in disguise. This tag signals the search engines that the page with ‘rel=canonical’ is the main hero and the rest are just variations that can be sidelined. It helps you steer clear of getting penalized for duplicate content while saving you from spending time and effort in creating more content.

Now that you know what a canonical tag is or how it is beneficial, let’s find out a few best practices to make sure you are using it the right way.

Best Practices for Using a Canonical Tag

1. You must canonicalize your homepage

Backlinking is one of the most precious and crucial practices for your organic SEO. This means that you will have other websites linking to your homepage and it’s something that will be out of your control.Adding a self-referential canonical tag on your homepage will help keep you away from any problems that might arise in the future as far as duplicity is concerned.

2. Be clear with your signals

Sending mixed signals is never a good idea – whether it’s in your life or your SEO. So, what do mixed signals include when we are talking about a canonical tag? It means that you shouldn’t canonicalize page X to page Y and then, page Y to page X.Also, don’t redirect your page Y to page X once you have canonicalized page X to page Y. It will send mixed signals to the search engine and it will either avoid it completely or interpret incorrectly.Just keep the communication between the two pages one-sided.

3. Cross-domain canonicalization

If you have, let’s say, two or more websites and you publish similar articles across domains, you can canonical tag.The downside of using this tag during this situation is that only one of your domains (the one with the tag) will rank on the SERPs. It will prevent the other websites from being seen on the result page.You should use this only if it matches the nature of your business.

4. Test dynamic tags

This is a practice that is especially important for eCommerce websites or CMS-driven websites.Sometimes, if you add a bad code, it will create a new canonical tag for every other version of the URL. This dissolves the entire purpose of you adding the tag in the first place.Thus, you should spot-check your URLs to be sure that your codes are right and in place.

5. Canonicalize near-duplicates carefully

You don’t need to canonicalize pages that are exactly the same.Yes, there are still a lot of speculations around using this tag for those pages that have similar content but might have just a few different elements added. Product pages that differ in location or currency are one example.But it is completely sensible to use these tags for such product pages and get the main version ranked on Google.

Work on your URL

We have already touched upon how you should identify and stick to just one version of the URL structure.

Another thing that you should focus on when your URL is concerned is how do they look; what do they say. Now, this is something that hardly anyone ever focuses on.

When you don’t put much thought into your URL, they can end up reading like this – “https://www.websitename.com/product.aspx?ID=nWs13au=ZVmlntPSY=P2Xq”.

It looks so messy. Such URLs are bad for your users as well as the search engines, which are your two target points.

While we talk about your user, it will be hard for them to remember such a URL and come back to your web page when they want.

As for the search engine, Google takes your URL, meta tags, and your content into account to understand the topic that is being talked about. So, you see, URL plays a major role in SEO but it is still one of the most overlooked aspects.

You should be using an URL that is clear, concise, and describes what your page is all about.

Take this travel website, Lonely Planet, for instance.

The URL that Lonely Planet has used for this particular page tells us exactly what the blog is all about i.e. best road trips from Montreal.

This is also a URL that users will find easier to remember.

Is keeping your URL simple the only practice to prepare your URL for SEO? Certainly not. Find a few practices to keep in mind below.

Best SEO practices for URL

1. Hide the prefixes

To make your URL more memorable and neat, you can eliminate the prefixes ‘www.’ and ‘https://’ in the address bar completely. There was a time when these prefixes were important, but they aren’t anymore.In fact, even Google hides their prefixes as it is not needed to be displayed because they have a secure icon. You can still look at the prefixes by just double-clicking on the URL in your address bar.

2. Use HTTPS

HTTPS is a more secure version of HTTP. It keeps the hackers away in case they try to trap and read the data.When you use HTTPS instead of HTTP, it makes your website look more credible to your users. Your users can induce trust in your website, especially when they are supposed to share their card details, address, or other personal information with that one additional letter.

3. Add keywords carefully

We discussed above that your URL needs to be clear because it helps Google understand the topic of the page. Now, you can add a keyword that is mentioned in the title of your page or blog post in your URL.It will make everything synchronized and also signal Google that your page has exactly what the topic is being searched for.Just make sure to not overstuff your URL with keywords as it will make it look spammy and will not work in your favor. Just one would do the job.A quick tip: You should also add this keyword to your meta description because Google will bolden your keyword which helps make your website stand out.

4. Use lowercase letters

You must keep your URL in lowercase because it gets case-sensitive once your domain name ends. So, let’s say your domain is websitename.com. If you search for WebsiteName.com, you’ll still come across websitename.com. However, if you search for websitename.com/Contact instead of websitename.com/contact, you’ll be redirected to a 404 page.So, if you are redesigning your website, make sure to update your URLs. Redirect them to new links. If you are just starting, keep it lowercase from the start.

5. Remove stop words

Certain words need not be a part of your URL. These are the stop words that include for, an, a, the, etc. The main reason to do this is to keep the URL crisp. This makes it more legible and memorable.The fewer words you add to your URL, the better.

6. Separate words with a hyphen

When you have two different words to add to your URL, it won’t allow you to add space in between. So, how would you keep these two words in your business name separated?It’s definitely not by using an underscore. The best way to ensure your website is SEO-friendly would be by using a hyphen in between the words. These hyphens simplify the URL name. It ensures that both search engines and users can read the name and understand where the breaks would be.For instance, www.websitename.com/seo-best-practices is much more legible and understandable than www.websitename.com/seobestpractices.

Focus on user experience

User experience has been the core of web design for decades. But now, thanks to the evolving algorithm, user experience has become a center for making the website SEO-friendly as well. The better the user experience, the higher are the chances of your website ranking on the search results.

You need to go beyond contrasting colors and the placement of buttons in your web design if you want Google to positively measure the UX signal of your website.

Google expects you to optimize your website to serve the needs of the users. One of these users is the search engine itself. This search engine then further helps other users on the web discover your content.

We have already covered plenty of points, and we have more coming up after this, on how you can improve the experience for search engines. Let us now focus on how you can make the experience better for your human users. Trust us, it goes beyond making your SEO web design mobile-friendly.

How to provide a good user experience for users and search engines

1. Consider website usability

Usability refers to the ease and user-friendliness of your website. It is an important part of the user experience because improved usability allows you to offer a positive user experience.You should have an intuitive approach when you work on the usability of your website. An intuitive approach circles the designs that are based on the concepts or principles that are already known to your user. For instance, when we look for a logo, we always glance at the top-left corner. Moreover, we expect the logo to be clickable and take us back to the homepage.Keeping these user mental modes in mind will help you design your website for your end-users.

2. Content hierarchy

Content is one of the most crucial elements of your website. And how it unravels and is organized can make all the difference.When considering both your end-user and the search engine, you should organize your content under subheadings. Just a plain, giant wall of text can get overwhelming.We are living in an era where time is never enough. And when you organize your content under a well-planned hierarchy, it helps make your content more skimmable. The more skimmable your content, the easier it will be for your users to find what they are looking for on your website.Adding subheaders also allows Google to understand what your topics are talking about.Use multiple heading tags to organize your content in a more hierarchical structure. Your H1 is your main title, H2 is an important subheading, H3 is a crucial sub-sub heading, so on and so forth.Just don’t go overboard with them. Your content should be categorized but still, maintain the flow.

3. Accurate title

By accurate title, we mean it should help you achieve two goals. And that includes:

• Describing the topic that you have covered on your web page
• Have the keyword that you are targeting

Make your title descriptive, catchy, and helpful. They should be able to set the user’s expectations right even before they have opened the link.

As for the keyword, for Google, it plays a very crucial role. Title tags are one of the important ranking factors. Moreover, when you add a keyword to a descriptive title, your users will be able to find what they had been searching for in the first place.

4. Natural language processing

Gone are the days when Google had to hand-code their algorithms. They would adopt the trial and error method and run extensive tests to find the solutions that improved search results.Then came the technological breakthrough. Of course, algorithm engineers are still a part of the cycle, but a machine learning algorithm (AI) named RankBrain was created to make things a little easier.This AI helps Google understand the topics that a web page circle and lets Google know what kind of search results do people expect to come across for particular search queries.An example of how RankBrain has helped Google is the introduction of the Passage algorithm. If you have noticed, Google now takes you directly to the section of a long web page that’s relevant to your user’s search query. Before the Passage algorithm existed, Google had some challenges in ranking long web pages.This shows that new technological updates at Google make sure that users are reaching the web pages that have required content and not the relevant keywords. It is now matching the answers to the questions that are being searched for and not the keywords.Thus, if you add content that is truly valuable and credible, you are good to go.

Take a look at this website by Airbnb. It has everything that is needed to offer a positive user experience. They have minimal text, search option right at the top, logo to the left that brings one back to the homepage, and the content is added under a well-planned hierarchy, among many other usability features.

Make Pages Indexable

If your pages are not indexable, they won’t rank. It’s as simple as that. Thus, it is extremely important that you make your web pages fully indexable.

Your page would be ‘indexed’ on Google if it is visited by the crawler, examined for the content available on the web page, and then stored on the index. If your website follows the guidelines by Google webmaster, it will be seen on the search engine results.

Take a look at these search results that rank for the keyword ‘best corporate gift suppliers in Australia’.

Here’s how you can make sure your page gets indexed.

Best Practices to Make Your Page Indexed

1. Hidden content

There was a time when websites had content hidden from the users but only visible to the search engines. For example, positioning content far off in the right such that it went off-screen.This was a famous spam technique to boost visibility when SEO was only dependent on a simple text matching algorithm.This led to the users having a poor experience as several websites had affiliate links. These sites only had keywords stuffed and no relevant information. The main purpose of such content was to create content for the SERPs. Nothing else.In today’s time, such a practice can lead to penalization. But don’t worry, there are ethical ways to hide content now.You can use hidden tabs instead of hidden text. Hidden tabs hide the content behind a ‘Read More’ signal. This gives the users an idea that there is more content but it is accessible after an additional click. So, it is there but it isn’t truly there. Hidden text, on the other hand, is completely inaccessible.So, you can hide content and still get indexed. It’s the best of both worlds!

2. Add alt text

Alt texts are underrated.It is impossible for search engines, including Google, to identify an image. They won’t know what is there in an image if you don’t make them understand.That’s where alt text comes into the picture. An alt text is a description of the image that is added to a web page. It is added for the times when the user’s internet is so slow that it fails to load an image and instead, text appears on the screen. Or, for those with disabilities, who are using a screen-reader to go through the web page.Using alt texts that describe the image thoroughly helps Google understand what the image is about and consequently, what the entire web page is all about. This improves the chances of your web images indexing and ranking on the Google Image results for search queries that are entered by the user.

3. Add transcripts

If Google cannot understand images, it certainly cannot understand videos or audio either. So, what do you do to signal the search engine? You add the video or audio transcripts.When you add a blog, the search engine can crawl your title, subheadings, content, everything. But when it comes to a video, you have a title and maybe a short description and that’s about it.Adding a transcript changes things.The search engine will be able to crawl your transcripts and index your videos/audios accordingly.It also offers a great user experience as not many can understand every accent. If they have the content written in front, they will be able to enjoy the video more.

4. Spot check your backend codes

There is a code that several websites use incorrectly and that’s the ‘noindex’ code. This is a meta tag that signals Google to not index a certain page.Many websites have used this meta tag on several important and big chunks of web pages. And that’s just wrong. It’s a wastage of the time and effort that you’ve put into the content on those pages.This is a code that is majorly used for those pages that are only created to be used by internal staff or for web pages that are still under construction.So, to ensure your web pages get indexed, you should just do a thorough check of your backend tags.

Apply schema markup

Schema is basically a code or structured data that influences how content would be displayed by the search engines on the search results. It has no SEO benefit but it does help to improve the CTR of a website.

How to Use Schema Markup

You can add a schema code to certain pieces of information such as people, business names, email addresses, phone numbers, star ratings, reviews, and even business addresses.

When you add schema, it enables Google to display such contact information on the search results.

Let us take an example.

The search engine already knows that London SW1A 1AA, UK is alphanumeric. It’s a string of both numbers and letters. Now, if you add schema to these alphanumeric characters, it will make it easy for the search engine to learn that this is an address of an extremely significant landmark for the Englishmen.

Improve Site Speed

We have talked in length about how important the side speed is for those users who use a mobile phone to access your website. Does that mean you should leave out those that use a desktop? Certainly not.

Site speed has been a ranking factor since 2010, irrespective of the device. Google will always reward those websites that load faster than those that take hours.

Moreover, with the kind of patience and time we have today, users are more likely to abandon the search result altogether than wait for the page to load.

Wondering how you can improve your site speed? Here are a few ways.

Ways to Improve Your Site Speed

1. Decrease redirects

Yes, it is suggested that you redirect your duplicate pages but it will impact the speed of your site. Thus, as far as duplicate content is concerned, it’s best to avoid it.When you redirect a page to another page, your user is made to wait for additional time. At least till the time the HTTP request-response cycle is getting completed.With every redirected page, your website speed will get slower and slower.

2. Conduct image optimization

The size of the image can play a crucial role in optimizing the speed of your website. To make sure your website loads faster, you must ensure your image size is not larger than it is needed to be. The images should also be of a compatible format. You should also make sure they are compressed for the web.By using CSS sprites, you can develop templates for images/visuals that you think you use often on your website. These could include buttons and icons. With CSS sprites, you can combine all the images into one large image, making them all load at once. You can even choose what sections you would want to display.This leads to fewer HTTP requests that save a lot of time because users don’t have to wait for everything to load.

3. Optimize back codes

The codes – JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, can often get a little complicated. It is suggested that you minify these codes and optimize them to increase the speed of your website drastically.Optimizing such backend codes could include eliminating irrelevant characters, spaces, unused code, code comments, and commas. It could also include making changes to the formatting of the codes.

4. Improve server response time

There are quite a lot of factors that affect the server response time.The resources each page takes, the amount of web traffic, the software your server utilizes, and also the hosting services you are currently using are a few of those factors.Whatever you need to do to improve your server response time has to do with these factors.Try and identify the performance blockages. These could be slow routing, slow database queries, or even inadequate memory. Once you have identified, take measures to fix these issues and work on your site’s speed.

5. Distribute content load using tools

You can leverage tools like a content distribution network to distribute the load of delivering web content. Content delivery/distribution networks are primarily a network of servers.These enable you to store your web copy at several geographically assorted data centers, giving your users faster and reliable access to the content that is available on your website.

Content guide

Just to recap a bit, as far as content is concerned, we have talked about mobile-friendly ways to upload content, jump links, hierarchy, and even the cons of duplicate content.

But what type of content should you be talking about on your website? How should the same be displayed?

This is where the content marketing funnel and information architecture play a major role. Let’s first discuss the funnel.

Content funnel

The job of your SEO web design is to not only make your website get indexed and rank in front of your prospects but also keep them engaged. Otherwise, it won’t solve any purpose.

If your users visit your website and stick around, it signals the search engine that users are finding your content relevant and valuable. That’s why they are spending time on it. It further boosts your site’s visibility on the SERPs for the keywords you are targeting.

To do this, you need the right content.

When a user lands on your website, they should be able to find what they are looking for, irrespective of the customer journey phase they are in. These phases include Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.

If you follow this marketing funnel, it will improve your chances of getting in front of customers who might already be considering taking services similar to yours. When done right, it improves your chances of converting such customers.

Here’s how a typical marketing funnel and the content related to it works –

For the Awareness stage (top of the funnel)

The main aim of the content at this stage is to help your customers identify and understand the problems they face. This is also the stage where you would showcase your credibility and experience to solve such problems.

The content that you can add at this stage includes:

• Webinars
• Blogs/Articles
• Comprehensive Guides
• Frequently Asked Questions

For Consideration stage (middle of the funnel)

The content that your prospects read during this stage helps them compare your services with that of the other similar businesses available in the market.

Thus, it is best if you could upload content that is practical and straightforward.

The content that you can add at this stage includes:

• Product demos (videos, preferably)
• Detailed case studies
• User guides
• Information about your product or service

For the Conversion stage (bottom of the funnel)

This is the stage where you gently push your customer to make the purchase from your business.

The content that you can add at this stage includes:

• Free trials or consultations
• Testimonials
• Reviews and ratings

When you add the right content for the right stages, it helps users find exactly what they are looking for on your website. As a result, they spend more time on the pages, thus, reducing the bounce rate on your website.

Now that you have an idea about what type of content you can add, let’s discuss how you can add it.

Information Architecture – Structure and Best Practices

The way you organize and structure your content on your website is the information architecture. It is one of the most crucial aspects of SEO web design because it is this structure that enables users to easily adjust to the functionality of the website.

Information architecture helps visitors to find what they’ve been looking for, without putting in too much effort. This structure is used by the UX designers as a blueprint to develop a navigation system across the website.

To offer a good user experience, you need good information architecture. Here’s how you can do it.

1. Challenge your biases

One of the biggest challenges that designers face is moving on from their preconceived beliefs and assumptions. These notions can often make the designer believe that they know better.However, you should rely on research and observations when it comes to design. It is only then that your information architecture will be designed for users and not for yourselves.

2. Don’t just stick to wireframes

Web designers need a blueprint. That’s true. They need a sitemap and wireframes to design the website. But it is now crucial to make the customer journey an integral part of it.You need to dive deep and understand who your audience truly is, what are their needs, challenges, and pain points. More importantly, what are they looking for on your website.Go beyond wireframes and structures when planning how you will unravel your information. It will give you a better idea of what should come first.

3. Work on the hierarchy

Hierarchy is the arrangement of the design elements on your web page.This hierarchy will help you arrange your content based on the eye-movement patterns of human beings. It means you would want to keep the most important elements at the points where the eyes go naturally.For example, for Westerners, who go from top to bottom and left to right, it is best to use a Z-shaped or F-shaped pattern. You can use a heat map to find the most visited spots on your web page.

4. Know your IA principles

There are eight principles of information architecture that you should have at your fingertips. These are principles of:

• Exemplars: Help users understand what content they should expect by providing them with examples.
• Growth: Prepare your information architecture for scalability for the time as and when your business grows.
• Focused Navigation: Instead of placing everything in one place on your website, provide the users with focused navigation ways to access your different content assets.
• Choices: Offer meaningful and relevant choices to your users.
• Objects: Your content should be unique. It should have different characteristics and should not resist change at any given point in time.
• Disclosure: Offer just enough information that gives the users an idea of what they will find if they keep navigating your website.
• Multiple Classification: Not everyone searches using the same query. Make sure your content is classified in a way that your users are able to find what they are looking for, irrespective of what they search for on your site.
• Front Doors: Not every user will enter your website through the front door i.e. the homepage. Every page should help users navigate your website easily.

Conclusion

We hope we have covered everything that needed to be covered. But if you still feel we missed out on certain elements or practices, or if there’s something that you do differently, we would love to know about that. And we are sure others reading this blog would do too. Drop your comments in the section below and let’s get chatting.

FAQs

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• When You Should Consider A Website Revamp
• What You Need To Do Before A Redesign
  • Backup your current website
  • Backup any and all current content assets
  • Create action/activity trackers
    • Step 1: Revisiting Buyer Personas
    • Step 2: Understanding Current Website Metrics
    • Step 3: Conduct Competitor Analysis
    • Step 4: Set Goals
    • Step 5: Create An Action Plan And Implement
    • Step 6: Test
• Website Redesign Best Practices
  • Employ A Mobile-First Approach
  • Highlight Key Areas With Contrasting Colours
  • Keep Website Design Consistent With Brand Theme
  • Make Use Of Visuals Whenever Possible
  • Optimize For SEO
  • Develop Dedicated Landing Pages For Important
    Offers
• Conclusion

Introduction

The web is filled to the brim with case studies boasting the incredible results marketing agencies have driven for their clients with a website redesign/revamp project.

From some generating a flood of additional traffic to others achieving record conversion numbers, these case studies almost position a website redesign as a surefire way to improve business results.

However, the reality of a website redesign is quite different.

While it is true that a poor designed and structured website hurts conversions, the process of a website redesign is a long and sometimes risky one.

There’s a lot that can go wrong with a website design even when it is seemingly well executed. For instance, your website could lose a significant portion of its current search traffic. Then there’s also the chance that your users may not agree with you about your ‘new’ website being better than the old one.

Thankfully, the web has empowered us with the tools and processes we need to make informed decisions about a website redesign. As a result, producing positive results from a website design becomes much more likely.

Before we get into the process of how we can eliminate and mitigate the risks and execute a profitable website redesign, let’s begin by looking at the most important question in the process- do you even need a website redesign?

Let’s find out.

When You Should Consider A Website Revamp

A website redesign is the process of revamping your website, including front-end elements like content, layouts, navigations, and more and back-end elements that may influence the functionality of the website.

The objective behind a website redesign is usually an improvement in conversions or website performance. However, sometimes websites are redesigned as part of a merger or a brand revamp as well.

Whatever your reason for considering a website redesign may be, in order to ensure the undertaking is positively impactful, it is critical to take data-backed decisions.

The first such decision is to decide if you really need a website redesign.

A website redesign is almost inevitable in the following cases:

• If you are launching a new product or service vertical
• If you are rebranding your business
• If you have recently acquired a new website that you want to brand like your other web
• If you don’t have a responsive website

However, if none of the above is the case, ask yourself the following questions:

• Has it been a long time since you built/last redesigned your website?
• Have you noticed a trend of diminishing traffic and conversion rates despite following best practices and implementing strategies that have worked well in the past?
• Have you ever seen/heard a user complain about the user experience on your website?

If your answer is a yes to any of those questions, a website redesign may be the way forward.

If you are still reading this, you probably want to redesign your website.

Without wasting any more time, let’s begin.

What You Need To Do Before A Redesign

As mentioned earlier, a website redesign is a long and risky process. Besides the risk of losing SEO progress and traffic, you also risk wasting your time and resources on a website design that may not make the expected/desired impact.

The worrying this is that this risk and its mitigation is omitted out of many website redesign processes. In such cases, the redesign agency or in-house resources responsible for the redesign jump into the overhaul of the current website without any risk mitigation in mind.

While the term ‘website redesign’ may suggest a dramatic overhaul of your entire website, it is certainly not the norm. In fact, a complete overhaul is rarely needed for improving the performance of most websites.

The best step you will take to mitigate your risk associated with a website overhaul is to not look at it as an overhaul at all.

Instead, consider this process as a series of informed and data-backed changes to the various elements of your website. Each of these changes will be tested against the existing version of your website in order to verify if they are truly making a positive impact and getting you closer to your goals of the website redesign.

Don’t worry, this approach does not mean you have to limit the number of changes you can make on your website. It just prevents you from feeling compelled to make changes to areas of your website that may be performing well.

With enough changes, you can still achieve the change in the ‘look and feel’ of your website that perhaps prompted you to even consider a website revamp in the first place.

Besides employing a risk mitigation strategy, the following are a few other things that you may consider doing before jumping into the actual redesign project:

1. Backup your current website

This step will act as insurance in case you are unsuccessful in transferring your backend SEO to your new website.

2. Backup any and all current content assets

Even the content assets that you may be thinking of redesigning should be backed up. The good ones have immense value to your marketing mix and the bad ones can be used as a guide to what should not be done with redesigned content assets.

3. Create action/activity trackers

The previous steps ensured that the risk involved with a website redesign is managed. This step is to ensure the long process of a website redesign that involves planning, editing and creating content, testing versions, is completed within the decided timeline.

Ideally, you should have a minimum of two trackers. One should be used to track the progress of sitewide changes such as implementing 301 redirects, image optimization, the on-page SEO optimization of new web pages etc.

The other tracker should be dedicated to specific tasks that will be performed on specific pages. These may include rewriting headlines/body copy, changing CTA button positions/copies, updating page layout etc.

Creating action trackers will help you ensure no tasks are overlooked, you are making the best use of the resources made available for this project, and that your project progresses without breaching the budget or the deadlines.

With your website and content assets backed up and your activity trackers in place, it is now time to jump into the actual website redesign.

Step 1: Revisiting Buyer Personas

Just like your website must evolve to keep up with changing times, your target audience must evolve too. Over time, your buyer’s preferences, pain points, and factors that influence their decisions may have evolved.

That’s why, when you are considering a website redesign, it is a good idea to revisit your buyer personas and see if anything has changed.

This way, you can plan your website redesign and its goals in a way that ensures that your new website continues to seamlessly solve for the visitor. It will help you ensure your new web copy is aligned with your updated buyer personas.

In other words, reviewing your buyer personas before a website redesign will help you ensure the website redesign actually helps in improving user experience and contribute positively to your brands’ online identity.

Step 2: Understanding Current Website Metrics

Next step is to analyse and understand current website metrics. Remember we discussed earlier that taking data-backed steps will help us mitigate and minimise the risk related to existing users not liking the revamped website? This is where we are collecting that data.

For each of your website pages, collect the following data in a spreadsheet:

• Number of monthly visitors
• Bounce rate
• Time on site
• DA/PA
• Inbound links
• Leads generated
• Conversion rate
• Heatmap and clicktracking report
• SEO performance (keywords ranking for, rank in SERPs for each target keyword)

These are the metrics that you must track but this list is not exhaustive by any measure. If the definition of success with certain pages requires you to track other metrics, feel free to add them to the list.

Besides creating this list, use this step to also analyze your best and worst performing pieces of content. Try to figure out what is working for your successful content pieces and how you can replicate the methods and elements on your new website.

Similarly, analyse your worst performing content pieces to determine what you must absolutely avoid when you design content for your revamped website.

Step 3: Conduct Competitor Analysis

In the digital world, no ‘informed’ decisions are taken without checking up on what the competition is doing. Thanks to the tools available to us today, like RankWatch, we can analyse everything about a competitor’s website.

In fact, there is so much information that one can analyse that the process of website analysis usually varies depending on the objective of the analysis.

In this case, our object is to inform our website redesign decisions. Keeping that in mind, here are three tips to conduct a competitor analysis that provides you with actionable insight that you can utilise for your website redesign project:

Analyse Competitor Websites On Metrics Discussed In Previous Step

You can utilise an SEO tool like RankWatch for this purpose. The objective here is to record all the metrics that inform us about which pages of the competitor’s website are performing well and why they are performing well.

The objective is to draw inspirations that will allow you to create more targeted content and layouts that will help you convert better.

Please note that you may or may not always be able to pinpoint the number of sales/conversion rates of specific competitor pages and that’s perfectly fine. The objective here is to find out as much as you can about the competitors.

Using an SEO tool will also enable you to pinpoint the opportunities (keywords, content assets) that you and your competitors may have missed in the past. When used right, such opportunities will enable you to secure some easy wins with your ‘new’ website.

Take Usability Inspiration

Look at some of your newer competitors that have created or updated their websites fairly recently. Look at how usability and user experience trends are being introduced in your industry and how the audience is responding to them.

To find information about the former, you will have to conduct manual research of your competitor’s websites. The information about the latter will be available in the website performance data of your competitors that you just collected (in the previous section of this step).

If you notice a new trend that is working well for one or more of your competitors, replicating the experience on your website might be a safe bet.

However, if you can think of a way to further add value with the same feature or website element, don’t hesitate to test your ideas.

How you can test said ideas, we will discuss in the upcoming steps. For now, just remember that there are no bad ideas and ensure everyone involved with the project knows the same.

Step 4: Set Goals

The first three steps of this process were dedicated to collecting data that would inform the decisions we take in this step and the ones that follow.

Now, it is time to really determine why you are conducting this website redesign. Getting inspired by the awesome results of a competitor’s redesign, or simply realising that your current design is outdated is not enough to truly guide an impactful redesign process.

Ask yourself, what do you want to really achieve with this website redesign project? Do you want to attract more traffic? Do you want to collect more emails with your content? Do you want to promote more expensive products?

In this step, your objective is to determine the exact metrics that you want to improve with a website redesign.

Based on this, you can go on to hypothesize the exact changes you must make to your website in order to improve the metrics you desire to improve.

Ideally, for every change you want to make, your statement of purpose should look something like:

“We should make change x to the element y because that may improve z”

As much as possible, make sure ‘z’ is something that improves the user experience to in turn, improve the chances of a conversion.

So, an example of a statement of purpose could be:

“We should rewrite the content on the product page with more emphasis on customer pain points and their solutions instead of focusing on features. This way, the visitors may be able to better understand our product’s application in improving their lives/solving their pain.”

Writing such statements might seem like a pain, especially when you are considering making several changes on a website that has several pages. Still, doing so will ensure every website redesign action that consumes your time and resources is purposeful. In fact, this is so beneficial that I recommend including these statements in the activity trackers that we discussed at the beginning of this process.

With that said, having purposeful statements guide you is not a surefire way to achieve success with your website redesign project.

Before we get into how success can be determined, we must first implement the website revamp changes. Which brings us to the next step in our process.

Step 5: Create An Action Plan And Implement

Now you know what you want to achieve with a website redesign and you also know what you need to do to get the desired results.

The time for planning is over and now, we implement.

Implementation of website design and content changes can take a lot of time. This is especially true if you have planned to rewrite, redesign, or recreate a lot of content. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that content production is the biggest bottleneck in any website redesign project.

Don’t worry, our process has accounted for this challenge earlier. While there is no way around producing high quality content, there is a way to make sure you are always on track, and that way is to use an activity tracker.

In fact, the activity tracker we created before starting this process will ensure all tasks involved in the implementation are executed on time. This way, even those tasks that may take more time than others, like SEO tasks, can be done on time without any chances of a miscommunication or a missed deadline.

With that said, it is important to assign specific tasks to specific resources with specific deadlines in order to ensure the project progresses as it should. It is also equally important to be realistic with deadlines to ensure quality of the output is not compromised.

After all, you are trying to improve what you already have (your website), and a compromise in quality beats the entire purpose of a website redesign.

Step 6: Test

After each task is implemented, you may be feeling a sense of gratification, and rightfully so. A website successful website revamp is surely a superb achievement.

However, you still don’t know if the website revamp is truly successful.

The only surefire way to determine success is to test the changes you have made against your original website.

Sure, all changes that you have made need not be tested. For instance, the content change we discussed as an example in the previous step does not merit A/B/n testing.

However, changes in areas like layout design, CTA buttons, and other such subjective areas must be tested to determine if they are truly making a positive impact to your website’s performance.

As you make changes and test them, you will be able to record your website’s reach closer to your goals in real time. If, in case, certain changes fail the A/B test, you can either go back to the ‘old’ design or think of a new iteration that may produce the desired results.

Continuous and consistent testing is not a website redesign task. Sure, it is involved in the process but it should be viewed more like a website maintenance task that you must carry out frequently in order to consistently improve the performance of your website (on different metrics).

Having said that, following best practices is one of the best ways to ensure that most of your A/B tests are successful.

Let’s look at some of the best practices you must follow to ensure the success of your website redesign project:

Website Redesign Best Practices

The following best practices are all aimed at improving the user experience on your website.

Employ A Mobile-First Approach

Ideally, you should have a website that performs seamlessly across devices of different sizes. With that said, since the number of mobile device users on the web has surpassed the number of desktop users, it is wise to think about your website with a mobile-first approach.

Technologies like responsive website design and accelerated mobile pages (AMP) are easy to implement to any website and give great returns by improving the experience of users on your website.

Highlight Key Areas With Contrasting Colours

Look at the screenshot above and think about what attracts your attention first and the most. My guess is that a significant chunk of the readers will find themselves looking at the “Try For Free” button.

Besides having a great offer at the front and center of their homepage, the RankWatch team has ensured that the most important CTA button on the page pops out.

Using contrasting colours for this purpose is known to work well.

Keep Website Design Consistent With Brand Theme

Your website is the online headquarter of your brand. In the online world, your website is the most important representation of your business and for this reason, it should be able to reflect the brand identity you have crafted (or want to craft) for your business.

To do this effectively, having a brand manual is strongly recommended. Such a manual will highlight the tone of voice, the language used in communications, and the colours used to represent your brand. Using this guide/manual, you can ensure consistency in each aspect of your website design and your marketing communication.

This will not only help your business appear more professional in the online landscape, it will also enable you to further reinforce the brand identity that you want to build for your business.

Make Use Of Visuals Whenever Possible

Pairing coloured visuals with written content increases people’s desire to read the content by a whopping 80%.

Most websites are a combination of visuals and text-based content. While many businesses put great focus on producing engaging and value focused written content for their audience, many make the mistake of pairing their amazing content with lousy stock images.

Don’t get me wrong, if you are working with a limited budget and can’t invest in custom photographs, using stock images still makes sense. However, if and when you plan a website redesign, it is a good idea to try to replace at least some of the images on your website with purpose driven customised photography and graphics.

Optimize For SEO

This one is a no-brainer. Optimizing each and every page on your website to be easily indexed and categorized by search engine crawlers is an absolute necessity from a marketing standpoint.

This becomes even more important during a website redesign where you risk losing the SEO progress of your ‘old’ website.

To take your optimization results to the next level, also consider optimizing your website for voice search. With the rise in the popularity of digital assistants, many experts believe voice search will be the ‘next big thing’ in the realm of SEO.

Develop Dedicated Landing Pages For Important Offers

Your most important offers deserve a special spotlight and the best way to provide them with this spotlight to dedicate landing pages to said offers.

Dedicated landing pages will enable you to track how different audiences are interacting with the offers. Moreover, you can test specific aspects of your landing pages to ensure you are continuously improving your conversion rates.

Not to forget, conducting A/B tests on landing pages will arm you with the knowledge you need to optimize the other pages of your website to improve conversions.

Conclusion

A website redesign has incredible potential to improve sales and conversions but only when it is planned and implemented correctly.

The correct way to do it? Stop thinking about conversions and start thinking about visitors/users. The more you are able to delight your website visitors, the better your conversion numbers will get.

FAQs

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Blogging
• Social Media
• Try to Turn Visitors into Newsletter Subscribers
• Take Advantage
  of the Reviews from Existing Customers to Enhance the Visibility of your Site
• Set Up Google Analytics
• Final Words

Introduction

A new website? Wow, that’s a huge thing! Right? But with great things, comes great responsibilities and those might, at times, seem overwhelming. Sometimes you might be lost as to what to do next. Let’s help you with some perspectives.

The task of building a website is a lot in itself. The ordeal is a long and strenuous one. It starts with hiring a good web designer and planning and making improvements till you have the website of your dreams.

However, once it is launched, you might find yourself thinking about what needs to be done next. Let us help you answer this question.

The next steps will include ways to enhance your presence across the web by reaching out to more of your target audience. It cannot be a single process or step; various methods need to be employed for your website to become a popular and successful one.

You would definitely not want to be the only person visiting your own website. Some of the many ways of improving site visibility are as follows:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This needs to be done even before your website goes live. Once the website is launched, make sure that you review the site once more to see if it has been optimized for search or not.

If not, just review the URLs, headers, titles, and content to see if they are aligned with targeted keywords.

Inbound links need to be paid attention to as well. These can bring in great dividends over time. For example, if you sponsor a local group so that another business can get their services, then add links to these groups.

Keep in mind that SEO is now an ongoing process and simply targeting for keywords is not going to help, if you want your website to perform.

2. Blogging

When you set up a website you must have a clear idea of what it is going to be about. If you expect people to come to your website, you need to know what information are you going to provide. Even if you are selling a product, blogging will help you become an authority in your industry. Not only is it great for SEO (as mentioned earlier), it builds invaluable credibility for your brand.

If your website comes across as lifeless or inattentive then they will look for other avenues and move away. Take it this way: Would you like to talk to a salesperson at a store or supermarket who is in one corner seeming that they would rather continue doing their job rather than talk to you? The answer is obviously no. So, do not be that salesperson. Blogging is an innovative way to interact with your website audience.

Blogging is an art that needs to be mastered as you should not come across as someone only interested in selling their brand. For example, if your website features a line of clothes then the blog should contain an article about the various types of clothes. However, you should never forget to mention casually that some great options can be found on your website as well.

Another important factor is that a dead blog can affect your website adversely. So try blogging only if you are completely committed to it.

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3. Social Media

Social Media is a great platform that can give your website a boost. After blogging and having innovative content on your website, this is surely going to give your website the visibility it needs.

Here is an example of how to put social media to good use:

Suppose your website is based on plant nursery, go ahead and subscribe to the Facebook discussions and Twitter feeds on gardening, landscaping or other such related topics.

Do not bluntly advertise your website as that might be seen in negative light.

Do it intelligently. Be active and participate in various discussions as soon as you see a relevant discussion share your website’s content and link so that you come across as a contributing member and not a business owner.

4. Try to Turn Visitors into Newsletter Subscribers

People will find more interest if you can provide content that is not only informative but helpful as well. A weekly or bi-weekly newsletter that can be sent via email would be a good platform to provide it.

Email might seem to be an outdated form of interaction compared to modern social platforms but believe us when we say that email marketing is still one of the best forms of online marketing. Statistics say, every dollar a business spends on email marketing brings back returns of $38, which is far better than any other channel.

While you set up the newsletter subscribe option, do not forget to provide an unsubscribe option as well. For example, in the USA, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 has made the presence of an unsubscribe option compulsory with email-based subscriptions.

5. Take Advantage of the Reviews from Existing Customers to Enhance the Visibility of your Site

Yelp might seem like a lot of trouble but it is a necessary evil. Reviews can play a significant role in improving the visibility of your site.

Other major review sites include Facebook, Google, Angie’s List, TripAdvisor, YP, and many others that are related to specific industries. Fabulous reviews can generate a lot of attention for your site. It is similar to what you would call “positive word of mouth”. These sites use tags on their websites which allow Google to reveal the ratings directly through their search results.

Suppose you search for “creative California yelp,” you will find that a five gold star rating under the link of the Yelp page. This is a good way to stand out in a list of similar sites.

Thinking about getting a good review by paying a bribe? Bad idea. This will violate terms of service of any and every review site. If you are genuinely committed to providing value to your customers, gentle reminders about leaving a positive review should do the job.

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Once you have done all of the above, then you have just started to get the word around of your website. As word starts to get around various opportunities will start to pop up for expanding the business. Do not hurry! Take your time to understand each opportunity and see whether it will stand the test of time.

If you see that the opportunity has great potential then waste no time, grab it. With this, you will see your website start to grow and reach its full potential.

6. Set Up Google Analytics

Google Analytics helps you understand which pages get the most visits, keywords relevant to your website that are most searched along with other factors that improve the visibility of a website. This is similar to the way a business owner uses customer data to figure out the popular products.

Final Words

Building a new website is actually just the first step. Making sure that it stays around for a long time with a huge inflow of visitors will take a lot of hard work.

Having said that, try to incorporate all of the above-discussed methods as a way to take care and improve your website. If you can do so successfully, then in a matter of a few weeks or months, word of your website will reach far and wide.

FAQs