Following an SEO process during a website redesign, allows a website to better the chances of it ranking highly in the search engines. While there are many options to build a website, taking the time to have a well thought out, well designed, and well marketed web site is a proven path to success.
SEO Process for a Website Redesign
What Are the Steps Involved for Doing SEO for a New Website?
Respecting all the steps of an SEO process, helps mitigating the potential risk to organic visibility while capitalising on the opportunities to sales and visibility that present themselves during the website redesign process. Pending on the size of the website and on requirements, the following 9 steps are required. The process and steps might vary according to the project’s needs and business type.
COLLECTING REQUIREMENT
This involves understanding your business objectives, culture, and targets by reviewing any UX data, marketing research and any other business information.
KEYWORD RESEARCH
The Keyword Research is crucial in an SEO project, to understand search behaviour of targeted audience, and intent. The keyword research creates the foundations of the website architecture and content strategy.
COMPETITORS ANALYSIS
This task helps to identify how your website competes in the Search Results Pages against your business and ranking competitors. The analysis provides insights on strategies needed to overcome competition.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Business requirements, keyword research and competitor’s analysis will inform the website Information Architecture (IA). To rank, your website needs to have solid structure to build upon.
CONTENT OPTIMISATION
This includes with your content team to create engaging content that is optimised to satisfy users’ queries intent.
WIREFRAMES DESIGN AND TECHNICAL AUDIT
This involves collaborating with developers and UX teams to ensure that design and technical elements are in line with SEO requirements.
WEBSITE MIGRATION AND REPORTING
Website migration must follow a process to avoid traffic and ranking loss. This task includes migration process guideline, developer’s checklist, and a reporting system to track KPIs and measure results.
LINK EARNING
PR and Social Media play an important role in creating awareness, and generating natural links and authority to your website. SEO works with PR, SEM and Social Media teams to maximize SEO benefits.
REPORTING AND ANALYSIS
This includes setting up Analytics and reports. Data analysis is particularly important to measure success and ROI of your SEO and digital marketing efforts.
ON-GOING SEO TESTING
Tests are done throughout the site built, but also after the build to improve conversions and users experience. Split A/B testing are often used to improve the performance of your SEO strategy.
SEO Redesign – The SEO Process Step by Step
STEP 1. Collecting Requirements
Getting a deep understanding of a business is crucial for the success of an SEO project. During this step, I supply a questionnaire and I review any marketing, UX and business data about the company and the website. It can be tedious or annoying to answer so many questions, but it is important to get a real understanding of your business objectives and limitations that could affect results. I need to have a clear picture of your targets and business to proceed to the next steps.
STEP 2. Keyword Research
This is by far the most important part of any SEO project. It is crucial to understanding your targeted audience, search behaviour and intent crucial. Data analysis is what drives your entire SEO strategy and can guide a business to accurately assess its strategic objectives and actions. The research will show what users are looking for and identify what content your website needs to target those users and intent. Keyword research analysis will show breakdown by audience and intent of your queries. You need to get a real understanding of your targeted audience to start creating content that matches that demand. Keywords’ findings are detrimental pieces of information and the baseline that will inform your website Information Architecture Strategy.
STEP 3. Competitors Analysis
The competitors’ analysis is done in combination with keyword research where I look at how your website is positioned against your competitors for your targeted keywords and audience. This analysis can give insights and an understanding of the competitors landscape and can help setting up strategies to overcome competition.
STEP 4. Information Architecture
The keyword research and competitor’s analysis findings will be used to inform the website information architecture and content strategy. A good solid Information Architecture logic needs to allow flexibility and scalability for future growth. I follow a siloing methodology which is a way to way to identify and group related information into distinct sections within a website. This methodology is built upon the principle that Search Engines award keyword relevancy based on the page and the supporting relevant content.
STEP 5. Content Audit and SEO Content Training
Content is “King”, meaning having a beautiful website which has low value to users will also be low valuable for search engines. Content needs to be optimised to satisfy users’ queries intent and to convert not just to rank. I will work with your content team to produce good valuable content that is appealing to both audiences and search engines. To do so I often offer SEO training and guidelines as well as checklists to help content teams through the journey. SEO copywriting keeps the user in mind while creating naturally engaging content.
STEP 6. Wireframes Design and Website Technical Audit
The wireframe review is an essential part of any website SEO redesign process. During this review, I work with the UX team to review design and I provide feedback on SEO on page elements as well as other SEO technical elements to ensure that the website will be built with SEO requirements. I will also look at CRO elements, to ensure your website design is set up with UX, CRO and SEO components.
It is vital for your website’s SEO health to start with a proper technical basis. During this phase, I work with developers to ensure that the new website is built observing SEO technical requirements and that elements such as crawling, indexing, rendering meet SEO criteria. Website accessibility is crucial for a proper indexation and a successful website migration.
STEP 7. Website Migration and Reporting
The SEO migration is critical for the success of an SEO project. I provide an SEO migration process and developers checklist to make the transition from an old domain to the new one as smooth as possible. Failing to properly migrate a website could cause traffic and ranking losses, which it will take months to recover, hence why I provide a detailed methodology and processes to follow.
During the process, I create a report to monitor conversions and traffic as well as KPIs metrics such as rankings and backlinks. Data are collected before and after launch to compare results and quickly identify if there are potential issues or roadblocks that could affect migration. Usually run daily checks for at least 2 weeks to ensure everything runs smoothly.
STEP 8. Link Building Strategies, PR and Social Media
There is not one size fits all when creating link building strategies, some strategies might be applicable to many websites, but in general you need a tailored approach. Social Media, PR and content marketing play an important role in building links to a website, hence why I work closely with the marketing team to coordinate SEO and SM, SEM and PR in parallel working together.
STEP 9. Reporting & Analysis
On-going reporting and analysis are needed to monitor KPIs and website performance. Pending on requirements I set up monthly reports and provide an in-depth analysis and feedback. I suggest this for any medium to long term SEO project. The depth of the analysis also depends on the project size.
Step 10. On-going SEO Testing
Tests are done to improve conversions and users experience. Tests might involve things like comparing title tags or headings, adjust linking or changing layouts, images, and call to actions. Split A/B testing are often used to improve the performance of your SEO strategy and involves dividing traffic to two different versions of the same page.
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GET A QUOTE NOWSEO Website Redesign FAQs
How long is the SEO process during a website redesign?
It depends on the website size, technical requirements, and resources. Based on my experience it can take up to 12 months to re-design a website. SEO does not delay the process; it just adds a layer of complexity since company stakeholders might not be familiar with it, therefore need to be trained to understand how the SEO process fits into the website development roadmap. The role of an SEO consultant, during website redesign it is to facilitate and manage communication across departments, hence the SEO consultant becomes the center piece that connect executives, marketing, content, and development teams together.
How long takes for SEO to start working after a website redesign?
Results can start as early as from 3 months up to 6 months for a new website launch. In saying that there is no one size fits all, as there are many elements that contribute to the success of the website relaunch. Factors such as competition level, the type and size of the website, brand recognition and inbound links are the key factors that will affect the results.
When should I engage with an SEO consultant if planning a website redesign?
A website owner should contact an SEO consultant as soon as possible, during the planning and researching phase. The biggest mistake is to ask SEO assistance when the website is almost completed and already in the design phase, since changes will be more problematic to implement and costly since they will require more financial investment.
Who is involved in the SEO project during redesign?
During a website redesign SEO project, a company needs to involve include executive members, as well as marketing, content, and developers’ teams on different stages. The SEO consultant become the center point of communication across all the teams.
What are the costs involved in SEO Website Redesign?
There is no one size fits all, costs depend on the scale of the project and the hours involved. Please get in touch for a detailed custom quote to find out more about costs.
Does website redesign affect SEO?
Based on my experience, the best results are obtained through a full redesign, changing things is much more complicated and sometimes not even possible. Many clients decide to re-design their website for specific reasons, not just SEO. In general, they want to improve users experience, re-brand, improve conversions and of course improve their SEO overall. So, in summary this is mainly a business decision.
Could I lose SEO results if a website fails to do SEO redesign correctly?
Yes, there are many risks during the process and if some of the steps within the process are omitted or incomplete or not implemented correctly, the website could lose SEO results and sales. Factors such as a solid architecture, optimised content, functional design, and a perfect migration are keys to the redesign success.