Launching a brand new site can be a thrilling experience, but there are fundamental mistakes that can cause big headaches if you overlook certain aspects.
Here are some tips to evade some very common SEO and UX errors when rebranding, redesigning, or re-platforming a website.
1. Select measurable and realistic objectives
There should be a reason and evidence for redesigning a new website; CMS is missing features that will increase user engagement, or bad site architecture could be causing poor organic search performance.
These objectives should deal with SEO targets like keeping organic traffic, improving key rankings and engagement targets, lowering your bounce rate, and increasing conversions. By doing so, you improve traffic and conversions; you can’t improve one without the other. The goals are also all measurable, and can be used to define success.
2. Asses your restrictions, weaknesses, and strengths
Defining accurate and realistic objectives not only involves familiarity of you site’s strengths and flaws, but also a solid and objective understanding of your competition and market. If you are in a very competitive field, with much more established brands, it would be naive to think a site migration will magically increase your traffic and sales.
Understand you position in the market and landscape; if you don’t think you can rival the competition, a new website won’t yield many returns.
3. Data
A data-driven mythology will improve you UX and design decisions. Analytics data will assist you in finding things like high and low traffic pages, user journeys, and much more. Once you have attained this data, you can arrange things that need improvement immediately, and maintain already functioning aspects.
4. Gauging content strategy
It is vital to evaluate and discuss content strategies early on; this way you avoid late nightmares and surprises. Both SEO and UX sides should contemplate all content strategy, point out possible issues and also make any recommendations. Calculating and identifying user experience issues and traffic loss prematurely is much better than once your site has gone live.
5. Testing with real users
User testing should be done by someone who matches the demographics of the site’s intended audience; this will guarantee important features are done correctly.
Usability is a very important factor for you end product, and testing prior to launch should not be overlooked.
6. Know and understand your budget
Be realistic about what can, and can’t be accomplished with your resources and budget. It is advised to always have additional funds within your budget to deal with any unexpected issues. Avoid trying to minimize project objective and goals just to save money; you don’t want to leave important things out only to pay more for them in the long run.
