When you hear the word "redesign" you mostly likely feel a wave of anxiety come crashing onto you as you think about the upcoming battles you'll have with coworkers, the enormous time investment, and of course the work itself to make it successful. Take a deep breath and let's take this one step at a time. We'll be walking through six steps in total for this redesign process, focusing today on step 1, Goals.
The SEO Website Redesign Process
- Goals
- Analysis
- Information Gathering
- Design & Testing
- Preparation
- Launch & Tracking
Part 1: Goals
The first thing you need to do should be obvious: everyone needs to lay out what the goals of the new website will be. It's important that you first just put everyone's goals up on a board or in a spreadsheet (however you best work) before you start debating them. I also recommend you organize the goals based on goal type. Here's an example:
Engagement Goals
- Improve bounce rate
- Increase time on site
- More return visitors
Conversion Goals
- Trial sign ups
- Improve conversion rates
- Improve profit per customer
- Larger orders
- More sales leads
- Event sign ups
SEO Goals
- Search friend design
- Attract more links
- Social interaction
- Improve internal link structure
Once everyone has expressed their opinion it's time for the big task at hand: prioritization. You need to separate your goals into three tiers: primary, secondary and tertiary; and everyone will need to agree on the prioritization. You'll use this prioritization list when making decisions in the design process. The primary goals will be the main focus of the redesign, and you'll find ways to accomplish your secondary and (hopefully) tertiary goals after they have been addressed.
In our next step in the design process we'll focus on analysis. Meaning, we'll go through our analytics and other data points and determine where we're failing and winning when it comes to achieving the goals we just setup. Stay tuned!
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