The first thing that you have to ask to yourself is why do you have a business website?
The Wrong Reasons for a Redesign “We have a new corporate look and feel.” “I’m tired of the old website.” “It’s been 12 months since the last redesign.” “The design department wants to.” “The CEO wants to do it.”
The Right Reason for Website Redesign “Get found by more prospects.” “Convert more prospects into leads and customers.” “Branding” might be a good reason… if it will drive the goals above.
Business websites are for lead generation so here are the 3 Keys to a Successful Website
- Website should attract prospects
How do you attract prospects? Use Inbound Marketing to Get Found:
- Create great content
- Optimize that content for search (SEO)
- Promote that content using social media
But why content is so important? Content drives visitors
- Search engines like fresh content (SEO)
- People like fresh content (social media)
- More content means more tickets in lottery
Publish Everything
- Blog
- Podcast
- Videos
- Photos
- Presentations
- EBooks
- News Releases
- Websites should convert visitors to leads.
How to do that? All websites need landing pages
Conversion is where we take what we have spent time and money to get (visitors) and change it into something valuable to marketing (leads).
- Calls to Actions everywhere (homepage, newsletters, emails, blog, e-books)
- Connect those CTA to your Landing Pages
- Websites should produce measurable ROI.
Measurement is easy online, a redesign without measurable improvements is a waste of time. Know your current stats and goals before starting the redesign.
So let talk now about some Tips for a Successful Website Redesign Process
Tip #1 Audit your website, then protect your key assets.
- Take an inventory of your website assets. Content, inbound links, keyword rankings, conversion tools
- Protect your assets during the redesign.
- Avoid website redesign pitfalls, removing valuable content, losing the value of inbound links, losing keyword rankings, changing good conversion tools, destroy your assets and you’ll get a drop in traffic and leads, you’ll also have wasted time, effort and money.
- Website Assets = Content, How many pages do you have? How many will be killed? Will pages move to a new URL? How many new pages will you create? What is your most popular content? What is your most powerful content?
- Website Assets = Links, How many inbound links do I have? Which interior web pages have links? Where are my links coming from? What are my most powerful links?
- Website Assets = Keyword Rankings, What keywords do I rank for today? What keywords do my competitors rank for? What keywords should I want to rank for? How has my keyword rank changed?
- Website Assets = Conversion Tools, What generates most of my leads? What are my best conversion tools? How can I increase conversions?
Tip #2 Spend resources on creating content
- Create Great Content by Blogging, Blogging attracts more links, attracts more visitors, brings social media success
Tip #3 Make it easy to run conversion experiments.
- All websites need landing pages
- Track your conversion rates
- Faster Experiments – Faster Results, How fast can you launch a new landing page?, Can one person do it in 15 minutes? What is the cost of experimentation?
Tip #4 Make it easy to measure results.
- Avoid Paralysis by Analysis
- Don’t measure everything.
- Being simple is better than being complicated.
- Focus on 3-5 metrics.
