1. Start with Goals
A successful website redesign project should start with developing goals. What’s the purpose for redesigning your website? Do you want to generate more visits and leads? All aspects of the redesign should be centered around achieving your goals. Your goals should be accompanied by strategies (approach to achieve your goals), objectives (measurable steps to achieve your strategies), and tactics (tools used to pursue an objective associated with a strategy). Developing goals, strategies, objectives and tactics will assure your website redesign project is off to a solid start with purpose.
2. Benchmark Metrics
To successfully achieve your website redesign goals, you’ll need to benchmark your current metrics as a starting point. Using analytics tools such as Google or HubSpot, document your monthly website visits, leads and conversions. This is also the opportunity to document anything that may be harmful to you achieving your goals. Evaluate your websites overall performance with tools such as Website Grader to measure your websites performance, mobile friendliness, SEO and security. Utilize Google Search Console to monitor your website’s performance in search and how Google and the world see your website. This may uncover areas for improvements. Think about the key phrases your customers use to search for your product or service. Perform searches and document your search position for each of your relevant search terms. Bench-marking your metrics gives your company a clear picture of where it’s at and helps guide the strategies on where you want to go.
3. Analyze Your Customers and Competitors
Knowing your customers and competitors is critical when developing strategies to achieve your goals. Buyer personas are fictional, generalized characters based on the real goals, needs and behaviors of your customers and potential customers. Personas help your marketing and sales teams better understand your customer’s challenges and pain points. Take a close look at your top competitors – what’s working and what’s not. Creating a SWOT analysis can be a useful tool in identifying your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to achieving your goals. Using buyer personas and SWOT analysis to understand your customers, your brand and your competitors will be at the center of your strategies to achieve your goals.
4. Assess Your Content
Assessing your content is the next important step in a successful website redesign. Utilize metrics to determine what pages are performing well and getting the most visits. Are those pages optimized for your SEO key phrases? Do they speak to your buyer personas needs and challenges? Do they ultimately support your goals for the website? This is the opportunity to identify if there is additional or updated information that can be added. Also, make a list of your current website URLs. In a redesign, you’ll want to use 301 redirects to point any of those URLs that change to the new URLs of the redesigned website. Understanding your assets and inhibitors will get you on your way to creating the content you need to achieve your goals.
5. Build for SEO and Lead Generation
If your goals are to generate more visits and leads, every aspect of your website and marketing should be centered around those goals. Enabling a blog platform allows you, guided by your content marketing strategy, to create content to boost SEO and build brand awareness by provide content that speaks to the unique challenges of your audience. Promoting your content via social media garners further reach and awareness. Make it easier for potential customers to find you by fine tuning each page with SEO optimized content, page titles, meta descriptions, URLs, image alt tags and H1 tags. Stay goal centric by creating campaigns that align with each of your buyer personas. Generate leads by creating landing pages leading to content offers that solve your buyer persona challenges. Create workflows within each campaign to nurture leads into customers with remarkable contextual content offers and email marketing. These steps will turn your website into a lead generating marketing tool for your business.
6. Develop A Content Marketing Strategy
Now your website has been redesigned based on your goals and buyer personas and includes SEO and lead generation best practices. But – you are not done. You’ll need to develop a content marketing strategy going forward to achieve your goals. What is content marketing? Content marketing is the process of creating content centered around buyer personas and distributed online to generate new leads. Content is created in the form of blog posts, e-books, checklists, case studies, etc. Where the potential customer is in the buyer’s journey dictates the type of content they should receive. For example, blog post promoted via social media are great for awareness and lead generation stages, e-books and checklists distributed via email marketing are great ways to nurture leads, while case studies and vendor comparisons are a great way to close customers. Developing a content marketing strategy is essential in creating long term lead generation opportunities.
7. Metrics, Metrics, Metrics
If your goals are to generate more visits and leads, you should be tracking those metrics and comparing them to your benchmark and month over month data. Create a monthly metrics report including website visits, reach, leads, customers and conversions. Website visits, leads and customers should be broken down by source; direct traffic, email marketing, organic search, paid search, referrals and social media. Reach should be broken into; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, email lists, etc. Conversion rates should be broken down by visits, leads, customers, visits-to-leads and leads-to-customers. Tracking metrics will help you make informed marketing decisions and measure your ROI.
8. Choose the Right Indianapolis Web Design Partner
Bringing it all together. We’ve outlined the steps to a successful website redesign; start with goals, benchmark metrics, analyze your customers and competition, assess your content, build for SEO and lead generation, develop a content marketing strategy and metrics. Take the time to determine your marketing budget and assess what assets your company has in in-house and what web design and marketing expertise you will need to outsource. Finding the right Indianapolis Web Design partner that aligns with your brand, budget and business goals will be essential for the success of your website redesign. Check out our article on 8 Awesome Tips for Choosing Your Web Design and Marketing Partner to help in your selection process. If you’re looking for a trusted Indianapolis Web Design partner, we’d love the opportunity to see if we are a fit for your success.