BlogSearch Engine Optimization (SEO)

Strategic SEO Decisions to Make Before Starting a Website Design

In today’s digital age, it is imperative for any business that wants to grow and be found online to have a proper SEO plan in place. Take a situation where you run an SEO audit, and the test results conclude that you need to redesign your website to optimize your…

By Ritwik Mitra
October 4, 2017

In today’s digital age, it is imperative for any business that wants to grow and be found online to have a proper SEO plan in place. Take a situation where you run an SEO audit, and the test results conclude that you need to redesign your website to optimize your SEO. In such a situation, before telling your web designers and developers to redesign the website, you need to take some strategic SEO decisions to ensure that your SEO efforts are going in the right direction so that you can get fruitful results and attain an increase in the traffic after your website redesign. Know more about the Best SEO Techniques to Rank #1 in Search Engines. Here is a step by step SEO for new website and SEO decisions which you need to take in order to ensure that your SEO website design strategy provides better results after your website redesign:

#1. How to Communicate your Mission Statement Online

As a performance marketer, it is very crucial for you to determine what would be your company’s marketing “value proposition”, i.e., what are the core solutions or services which your company offers to your prospective customers in order to satisfy their needs and/or queries. After identifying this, the next thing which you need to ensure is that do your prospective customers know about your value proposition, i.e., whether you are able to communicate it to them online. You need to analyze some strategic issues, which can be as follows: are the terms describing your customer’s problems or the solution you provide being searched online? If there are not many searches for your value proposition, then you need to create a brand association with the solutions you offer to your customer’s specific needs. You also need to take into consideration the competitiveness of the keywords you use. If the keywords which you find are suitable for your business but are highly competitive in the industry, then you need to focus on long-tail keywords, which will be very helpful in bringing huge traffic to your website in a short period of time.

#2. Analyze your Customer Segment

Before redesigning your website, you need to do an analysis of your customer segments. Introspect and ask yourself some critical questions, such as how large is your market, and whether the potential audience is growing or shrinking. You need to research your buyer personas again and identify their demographics, motivations, roles, etc. You also need to analyze how they behave in both offline and online circumstances. This analysis will help you optimize your site’s architecture around the stages of your buyer’s journey. As a performance marketer, your most important goal is to bring more and more customers to your website to result in maximum sales. Ideally, this process needs to be implemented before you build your site so that you can optimize the pages of their interest with keywords that are specifically targeted according to their intent or queries.

#3. Introspect about your online competition

Analyzing your competitors in the online space and knowing the strengths or opportunities that you have against them can be extremely helpful while taking critical SEO decisions, such as undergoing a website re-design. To begin with, you must identify who your competitors are, that generally fall under these three main categories of competition:

Search competitors: These are the competitors who rank for the product/service that you offer. They will compete for the same keywords that you are targeting but may cater to a completely different intent.

Business competitors: These are the competitors that are currently solving the customer problem you aim to fix.

Cross-industry competitors: These are not your direct competition, but aim to solve your customer’s problems indirectly.

After you have conducted your competition analysis, analyze where each competitor stands and how much operating cost it will take to get where they currently are. You need to ask yourself a few questions, such as what’s your competitor’s size and performance, how you can differentiate yourself from them, and what improvisations you can make from their website.

#4. Technical Area

Use HTTP - Use HTTPS to keep your audience's website experience private and secure. Your website will be ranked higher if your clients feel reliable. Speed of your website - Your website's user experience is a very important need. Optimize your website design and SEO so that your target audience isn't disturbed by its slow loading time. Decide on a canonical version of your URLs - A page is unique if it has a unique ID in the website's database, whereas the URL is a unique identifier for search engines. A developer should be informed that each piece of content material should have a URL. The Geographical and Linguistic Aspect - If you want to appeal to people from all over the world, you'll need to decide if your site should be multilingual, multi-regional, or both. Localised keyword research, flang considerations, and duplicate content are all difficulties that should be addressed prior to launching a website. Using different country-level domain names has the advantage of allowing you to target a country or language more specifically. Ease of editing and flexibility in a platform - Google's suggestions and standards are frequently updated. Your platform must be adaptable enough to allow you to make rapid modifications to your site at a large scale. When it comes to seo website design, flexible systems that are simple to change are the ideal options.

#5. Digital Area

Content Architecture - If you want your audience to find the information you're offering, then the manner in which you organize it is critical. When clients and search engines are looking for precise information, flat site structures are the most effective. Analyze your users' behaviour to provide suggestions for structuring, categorizing, and linking your website's information and pages. Responsive Design - The best websites are those that adapt to a variety of devices in a way that is both functional and appealing. Responsiveness is a "must-have" characteristic when it comes to website design. Check out the most popular SEO and web design trends using web research and adapt with digital advancements. Machine readability (Flash, JS, iFrame) and structured data - A range of technologies that are difficult for crawlers to understand, such as Javascript, Flash, and Ajax; although they are required for a better user experience, you must be mindful of the problems that these technologies can cause. To improve your site's machine readability, add structured data to your pages. Once you decide to undergo a complete website revamp, it will certainly be difficult for you to optimize some critical SEO areas. Hence, as a prudent marketer, you must take these key SEO decisions before going for your website redesign. Not paying attention to these SEO factors can prove to be detrimental to your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings.