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Website Redesign: 5 Important SEO Checklist

Written by Ramdhani Rakhmat, 02 August 2018

Website redesign is a great project which involves decisions from many stakeholders; from website development team as a technical team, strategic team, creative team, and also financial team. Starting from planning your goal to building your site from scratch, it takes months of planning, designing, writing, and development before you can launch your website. One important key to make sure your web launch goes smoothly is to make sure your website speaks a search engine language or Search Engine Optimization.

How do you ensure that any SEO value you make on your old website is appropriate and meets your expectations? If its already aligned with your expectations, should it be maintained? Where do we measure the success of SEO value from your old site? Here are 5 metrics that are forgotten by many people when doing website redesign:

1. Determine Goals

Before you begin to work on a new design or structuring the content, you should ask this in advance.

What are the main goals and objectives that your brand trying to achieved for this new website?

If you are planning to use your website to generate sales leads, your content and user experience must be aligned with your conversion path; helping to foster visitors into prospects. This is a key element of an incoming marketing program. To find prospects, you want to raise awareness by increasing traffic. It means more blogging, premium content creation, social sharing. In short, creating reasons for people to come back. No website fits all. So when discussing website redesign with your team, think about these core elements:

  • Website Goal: What your brand trying to achieve during 3-6 months?
  • Buyer’s Persona: Who are your potential customer?
  • Buyer’s Journey: What is the main phase experience when your customer deciding to buy your products?
  • Key Elements: What features and components do we have to help us achieve our goals?

2. Keyword Research and Optimization

There are many things that should be prepared during the process of website redesign involving content creation, design, and UX strategies. Keyword research is one of the best steps before we start producing content that will be used on our website. Keywords that have been researched and implemented on your new site can help search engines simplify their work and your website will be easily discovered by users when we use the right keywords. Keywords should be:

  • Relevant and reflect to your buyer’s persona
  • Represent your audience pain point, their goals, and their challenges

Keyword research has a big impact on SEO. By using your keyword list, you will be able to optimize some of the following from each of your web pages:

  • URL
  • Meta Title
  • Meta Description
  • H1 header tag
  • Body copy
  • Image alt-text

Check : Website Redesign: What You Need to Prepare

3. Social Media

Other big thing to consider about website redesign and SEO is social media. Integrating social media into your website with all campaigns that conducted on both social media and your website allows you to reach potential customers and increase your brand presence in the digital. Your website and social media platform must work together and support each other in order to providing updated, relevant, and consistent content for consumers.

Make it easy for your users to connect from your website to all of your social media platforms, providing social sharing and buttons. You can place them on your landing page, blog posts and product and service pages.

Engagement from users who connect from social media into your website will help to increase the page authority on your website. The rank of your page’s authority can be check at MOZ SEO.

4. Sitemap and Validation Search Console

Every website should generate sitemap file and submit a sitemap to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. For google you can do it on Google Search Console or Webmaster tools. Sitemaps are useful for showing the entire URL for your site and help search engine to understanding site organization and URLs structure that exist on your website. This might not sounds like website redesign, but it’s an important step to do during your redesigning process.

5. Data Analytics

Measuring traffic allows you to measure the level of effectiveness of your website. In addition, the data you collected can be use a benchmark and help you setting your goals for your website redesign. The more people you attract, especially the audience that fits your target, the more chance you have to turn them into customers.

You should measure these couple of metrics at minimum:

  • Total traffic (from organic search, referrals, etc.)
  • Conversion rates (ideally, each step between traffic and customers)
  • Which pages are getting
  • Organic traffic (usually mapped to the best keywords)
  • Inbound links (the sites that are linking back to you)

There are several kinds of tools that you can use to perform data analysis such as google analytics, similar web, and hubspot analytics.

Now that you’ve learned the 5 Forgotten SEO Metrics, you can start planning your website redesign. A simple checklist like ’10-Steps Checklist for your next Website Redesign’  will make things easier and more organized for your planning process.

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