Search Engine Optimization is about getting seen by search engines. With the many and the everchanging signals they use, websites need to adapt to changes much often in order to compete on their niche.
In a scenario where you're redesigning your old website because of certain necessity, there are several SEO areas to consider. This is to address existing problems or to improve the achieved organic rankings. After technology audit, market analysis and conversion funnel review, you need to answer the following:
"Redesign just the architecture," or "Migrate everything altogether," or Change the existing business model."
This moment can happen when most of your website's visitor are coming from search engines. Since website redesign should always have search engine in mind, there are three areas you need to consider before redesigning your website.
Strategic Areas
The first thing to know when considering SEO in your efforts for website redesign, is the understand how your business communicate its mission statement.
Is your website capable of answering visitors' problems by having the solution crawled and indexed by search engines? Is there any existing values that your website have, but not yet properly positioned?
You need to create a brand that is able to associate itself to your products and/or services in order to address specific people's needs. You also need to know how competitive your website is on the market. You may need to have variations based on a thorough market analysis to answer the following:
- How large is the market?
- How and where are the majority of visitors and users come from?
- Who are they? And how do they behave online and offline?
- What do they want? How is your website capable of answering their needs?
Answering the above questions will allow you to build the your website's architecture based on the needs of your customers. This will also grant you the ability to know which keywords to target, and what pages should be created to target specific intents.
The next thing to do is to know your competitors. By having knowledge of their competing abilities, size and also performance, you will get insights about their brands' strength, their ability to differentiate, and also their website's architectures.
Technical Areas
They are the areas to consider for web developers in order to avoid future web failures, or migration/rebuild.
When concerning the technical parts of your website, you need to know what platform or technology that work best for your website. Do you need a framework? Custom? Or maybe CMS? Other technical areas to consider include:
- HTTP or HTTPS: While HTTP is faster, Google and other search engines are putting more importance on HTTPS pages.
- Decide on a canonical URLs: This is to show search engines which of your pages are more preferred. 301 redirects should be used in order to prevent duplicate pages.
- Language and targeting: If you're targeting specific country, you need to decide whether your website should be multilingual or not. You may consider in using localized keywords,
hreflangand dealing with duplicate contents. - Flexibility: You may need to use the technology that is flexible enough for you to maintain. This way, you can make quick changes whenever search engines update their recommendations/requirements.
Uli>Website speed: more features can translate to slower pages. Understanding the waterfall diagram of your previous website should give your some insights.
Design Areas
In order to make your new website appeal to both search engines and visitors, you need to make it look good with the ability to provide the experience they all wanted. From how the website is designed to how it should behave when users are seeking information, your website should perform at its peak, while giving people all they want as soon as they ask.
Things to consider include:
- Architecture and linking: your website should be designed to ease the flow of information, and most of your website should be accessible within at least 4 clicks from the homepage.
- Prioritizing contents: know what contents will be hosted on your website in order to know what content strategy should be implemented. From the format to their functionalities, everything should be planned.
- Front-end technology: Modern websites use JavaScripts while lesser others use Flash and AJAX. Know how your website can make use of them without giving search engines' crawlers a hard time to understand.
- Responsive web design: to make your website accessible on more devices without affecting experience in a bad way, you need to create a website that is friendly on mobile as it is on desktop.