website redesign - profromgo.comprofromgo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/pfg-checklist-final.pdf ·...
TRANSCRIPT
IntroductionSometimes we outgrow our websites. Maybe you’ve let updates lapse, the look and feel seem dated or stale, or you’re just want something different. Redesigning your company’s website is a great way to give your online presence a shot in the arm.
Of course, there are plenty of other reasons you might want to redesign your website. Maybe your company is re-branding entirely or you’re moving onto a new Content Management System (CMS). You may even need to rescue the site from a hostage situation, such as a developer who won’t return your calls anymore or a bad hosting platform.
No matter what your reason, you’re not alone. A redesign can be a huge success or a total disaster. It’s not always an easy process, but with the right tools, the end results are well worth the time, money and energy.
That’s where checklists like this come in handy. Keep reading to discover some important pre-redesign tips to save you from more than a few headaches.
Remember, no matter if you’re working with an agency or redesigning your site in-house, the overall goal of your website should be to support and improve your digital marketing efforts. Your website isn’t a silo and it’s not just about design. Your website affects your social media, email marketing, lead generation, brand awareness and even your sales strategies.
Analyze Your Current Site’s Performance
It’s important to understand how your current website is performing before you start a redesign. This lets you set goals for the new site and gives you some valuable insights into how much better your new site is doing.
If you’re not currently analyzing your site’s performance, add a tool like Google Analytics or HubSpot’s closed-loop anayltics. Both of these are easy to use and will help shed some light on the current state of your website. After all, it’s a lot easier to justify a website redesign when you’ve got the metrics (or lack thereof) to back it up.
So, what are some important metrics to look at?
Site visits/visitors/ unique visits.Site traffic tells you how many people have viewed various pages on your website in a given time frame. Do you see any trends?
Bounce RateThe lower this percentage, the better. A bounce rate tells you how many people come to your site, but don’t take any more action such as clicking a call to action (CTA) or spending enough time reading your content. Higher bounce rates mean people aren’t sticking around.
Time on SiteRelated to bounce rates, Time on Site helps you determine just how long people are spending on your site and individual pages. Are they clicking onto it and leaving after 15 seconds? That’s not great. Depending on the amount of content, you want this number to be significant.
1
SEO Rankings and KeywordsSEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Web pages that are optimized have a better chance of showing up in search queries on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. There are a lot of factors that go into your site’s SEO, but one big way is through the Keywords you use throughout page copy. For example: A keyword for which we optimized this ebook was “How to start a website redesign.” We put this phrase and others like it in our web copy, URL, headings, meta descriptions and alt text.
Domain AuthorityIt’s a scary-sounding phrase, but Domain Authority is simply an overall score of your site’s ability to rank on search engines results pages (SERPs). As with SEO, there are a number of factors that go into calculating this score, but you want to shoot for a high domain authority.
New Leads/Form SubmissionsIs your website actually doing its job? In other words, does the site generate new leads—usually through visitors illing out a contact form. Even if you gather most of your leads over the phone, you can still trace this data back to your site in one way or another. Don’t have a lead capture system in place? We can help with that, too!
Generated SalesThe bottom line, the return on investment (ROI). Does your current website contribute to your company’s overall sales? There are ways to track this through Google Analytics and other tools, but you might already have an idea. Think about your own online purchasing? Have you ever opted to not buy a product or service because the site was hard to use? How many of your potential customers are thinking the same thing?
Set Goals for Your New WebsiteWhat do you want to achieve through your website redesign? We’ve heard “just because it’s been a while since we’ve overhauled our site,” or “I want my business to look bigger” too many times to count. Truth be told, these are great goals. Sure, the way your site looks and how visitors interact with it are important, but the darn thing needs to work, too.
At ProFromGo, we’re all about SMART goals. It’s a nifty little acronym that helps guide the overall success of your project. Your goals should be:
S M A R T Specific Measurable Attainable Relevant Timely
In other words, what do you want this website to actually achieve? How will you track the goals? Are the realistic and important to your company’s success? What’s the time frame for achieving them?
Need a little inspiration? Look back at Step 1. Improving all of those metrics are great SMART goals. Maybe you want to increase overall site traffic by 30% in 6 months, or capture 50 marketing qualified leads (MQLs) in Q2. Try to stay away from vague goals like, “decrease bounce rate,” or “better SEO.” These aren’t clear and will leave your team scratching their heads when it’s time to review the redesigned site’s progress.
2
Use this space to list some potential SMART goals:
Look at What Your Competitors Are DoingWe’re not saying copy your competitor’s sites, but checking out the online presence of others in your industry can help drum up some inspiration. What do you like about these sites? What do you hate? What do you know your company could do better? Here are a few things to consider:
What kind of content do they feature?
Does the site have a good user experience (UX)?
Would you buy their product or service based on the website?
Aside from just aesthetics and content, you can also see where you stand compared to your competitors. With tools like SEMrush, you can see what keywords your competitors rank for and how your site stacks up. Other tools like Marketing Grader can show you exactly how you and your competitors are performing.
Don’t let this intimidate you. The whole point of a website redesign is to amplify the parts of your site that are working and improve the areas that aren’t.
Feeling inspired yet? Jot down some of your ideas below to keep track of them!
3
Keep Track of Your Existing Assets
Redesigning your website doesn’t have to mean doing a complete overhaul. You probably have tons of great content, images and other valuable information to bring over to your new site once it’s live. Hitting that big red DELETE button and starting completely from scratch can actually hurt the success of your new site. Consider some of your website’s greatest assets, like:
4
Your best performing contentDo you have content that racks up pageviews and/or get shared a lot on social media? Those are definitely keepers.
Highly-Trafficked pagesPages with a lot of traffic are an SEO goldmine. You’re doing something right on those pages. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
High-ranking keywordsWhat keywords are getting your site the most traffic? They’ll continue doing that on the new site, so make sure you maintain a list of them somewhere.
Inbound links to individual pagesInbound links help your audience find the content that’s just right for them. Give potential customers a clear line of sight to the information that will help them choose your company.
Identify Your Unique Value PropositionNow that you’ve thought about the goals for your new site and how you stack up against your competitors, you’re probably getting a sense of the kind of content you want to include on your new site. But before you begin crafting this new content, be clear about your Unique Value Proposition (UVP).
In other words, what can you do for your customers that others can’t?
This is especially important if your site attracts, or hopes to attract, a high number of unique visitors who might not be familiar with your company and what you do. It’s important to immediately answer this question on every single page on your website. Why should visitors buy/convert/stay on your site and not flee to your competitors?
You can think of your UVP as your website’s mission statement. What is it there to do? Make sure to articulate this before creating content. It may be helpful to be as plain-spoken as possible. Remember, not every visitor is as big of an expert as you are. Consider these examples.
HubSpot assists organizations across multiple countries to reduce churn by backfilling the sales pipeline with highly qualified traffic that generates leads that convert into customers with high lifetime value. We achieve this through leading-edge software that integrates all marketing channels for a synergistic view of the data that determines and prioritizes the high-value marketing activities.
If you’re unfamiliar with language of HubSpot or lead generation, this probably turned you off pretty quickly. But what about this?
HubSpot all-in-one marketing software helps more than 6,000 companies in 45 countries attract leads and convert them into customers. A pioneer in inbound marketing, HubSpot aims to help its customers make marketing that people actually love.
Much better! Sure, maybe it doesn’t go into the exact methodology, but it tells readers that the HubSpot marketing software helps companies turn leads into customers and has a track record to prove it.
Take time to really think about your UVP. Consult your team and try to get to the heart of what your company does and why you do it.
5
What are your potential UVPs?
Design Your Site with Your Audience in MindA great website is definitely something to be proud of. It’s ideally a reflection of your company’s abilities, service/products and culture. While having a website you love is super important, it’s just as crucial that your audience loves it, too.
How do you know what your audience will love? By speaking their language and designing content they’ll actually want to read. Ok, great, but how do you figure that out? Buyer Personas.
Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers that are based on real data you’ve collected. Sure, you’ll need to make some generalizations and speculate a little, but this exercise will help you nail down who your redesigned website is actually made for.
There are three main steps in building your buyer personas.
Segment by Demographics
Start by thinking about your existing customers. Who are the most common buyers of your product or service? Depending on your business, you may have several archetypes. Try to be as detailed as possible. Try to think about their name, job title, what industry or company they work in, and even “census” info like age, gender, level of education and yearly income.
Identify Their Needs
What do these personas want? What problems does your company ideally solve for them? Are there any trends that might influence their business or personal success? Look at any existing reviews, or ask your customer support team what questions they get asked most often. Figure out not just what you can do for your personas, but how you can do it better than your competition.
Develop Behavior-Based Profiles
What do they do online? Are they active on Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks? What kind of search terms do they use? What kind of information do they tend to consume online? Which of your products do they spend the most time researching? How do they use those products? Figure out how customers are finding you and tailor your site and marketing content accordingly.
Once you’ve established your buyer personas, get in the habit of treating them like real people. It sounds a little cheesy, but it can really help when it comes to making decisions about your website’s layout and content. “Would Purchasing Manager Pam get the info she needs out of this page?” “What questions would Site Foreman Frank have after reading this article?”
Use the space on the next page to bring your personas to life. Fill in any relevant information that will allow you to visualize the person you are talking to and how best to serve them. Have fun with it!
6
Name | Title:
Age:
Gender (if relevant):
Key personality traits:
How do you speak to this persona?
What are their main needs? How do you fill them?
Name | Title:
Age:
Gender (if relevant):
Key personality traits:
How do you speak to this persona?
What are their main needs? How do you fill them?
Name | Title:
Age:
Gender (if relevant):
Key personality traits:
How do you speak to this persona?
What are their main needs? How do you fill them?
Search Engine OptimizationWe’ve talked a little bit about SEO in other sections, but let’s dive into it. Plainly put, getting found online is essential to your company’s marketing success. If no one’s coming to your site, you’re not going to increase your number of leads or sales.
When you’re beginning a site redesign, here are a few important SEO tasks to help you stay in front of your audience once the new site is live.
There are three main steps in building your buyer personas.
Keep track of your most search-valued pages
We talked about this in Step 3, but it’s important enough to revisit. Keep tabs on the strongest SEO juice, the most traffic, inbound links and keywords rankings. Make sure these pages have the proper 301 redirects when it’s time to migrate content to the new site so they don’t lose their SEO value.
Create a 301 redirect strategy
Speaking of 301s, this may be THE most important step when it comes to retaining site traffic and your search engine rankings. Create a spreadsheet to record and map all of the 301 redirects you plan to create.
Keyword Research
Keywords are a building block of SEO. For every single page on your site, pick one or two keywords to pepper throughout the page content, headers, URL, meta descriptions and alt-text. Take time to really think about your UVP. Consult your team and try to get to the heart of what your company does and why you do it.
Search Engine Optimization isn’t a quick project, but it’s one of the most important steps of this entire process. You can have the prettiest website in the world, full of the greatest content your industry has ever seen, but if no one can find it, it’s all for naught.
7
Calls to ActionCalls to Action (CTAs) help drive visitors to do something on your site. Maybe it’s filling out a contact form, subscribing to a newsletter, reading more content or downloading an ebook. CTAs help your audience engage with your site and keep it from simply being an online brochure.
If you’re lacking in the CTA department, try to think up some ways your visitors/potential customers would want to engage with your site. What can you do to help them convert from site visitors to leads to customers?
At the same time, don’t go overboard with the CTAs. You don’t want to overwhelm your visitors. Try to limit CTAs to one per page. Think about the logical next step for visitors to take. For instance, a new visitor who reads a blog post probably isn’t ready to speak to a sales rep, but she might be so inclined to download your whitepaper.
Make a list of potential useful CTAs:
8
Create a Content StrategyIt’s a pretty simple idea. More content leads to more site visitors and help you grow your business faster. However, adding content just to have more web pages isn’t a great idea. Every piece of content on your site needs to do work.
A constant flow of fresh content starts with a solid content strategy that gives you, your team and your marketing agency a road map for regularly adding new content to your site and leveraging the content that exists.
How do you keep adding content to your site? Here are a few ideas:
Start a blogCompanies that maintain a blog have 55% more traffic and 88% more leads than those that don’t. Your blog doesn’t have to be super in-depth, but should provide a list of diverse topics that are relevant and timely to your readers. Think back to your buyer personas. What questions do they have? What are their interests?
Do some PR
Is anybody home? Company news and announcements are a great way to add content to your site and show your audience how great you’re doing. Post press releases and share milestones. This also helps potential customers get to know a little bit about your company’s culture.
Content Refresh
Just like you’re redesigning your site, refreshing content that’s gotten a little stale or outdated is a great way to leverage existing assets while making them new again. In fact, Google and other search engines LOVE to see this. It shows your constantly working on your site and making improvements.
9
Don’t Forget the Extras
Every website has a few essential ingredients: homepage, product/service pages, and a Contact Us section. Even if you offer a blog and other resources, there are still plenty of add-ons that can help your redesigned site shine even brighter.
Landing and Thank You PagesThese pages don’t appear in your site’s main navigation. They’re usually only accessible via specific marketing channels such as social media, email marketing, or calls to action on other site pages. Landing pages (like the one you used to access this ebook) are usually simple and encourage the visitor to take one specific action, such as downloading an ebook or filling out a form. Thank You pages (like the one you saw after filling out our contact form) provide the actual content offer and/or suggest other areas of the site to visit.
Sharing FunctionsAdd icons on various pages that allow visitors to instantly share your site content on various social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. This helps get your content in front of more visitors.
Social MediaSpeaking of sharing, maintain a regular social media presence to further engage your audience. Try to update these regularly and respond to any comments or messages your receive in a timely manner. You don’t have to maintain a presence on every platform, but one or two are a great way to promote your brand.
AnalyticsIt was the first thing we talked about and it will be the last. That’s because analytics are the be-all end-all of your redesigned site. They help you measure and track goals, see how your site is performing and provide valuable insights that you may not have realized.
10
