It’s true. Having your website redesigned can be costly. It’s also true that having Search Engine Optimization on your site can be expensive. But the benefits of search engine optimization and in turn, website redesign, truly outweigh the costs – especially if you want your business to compete (or defeat, for that matter!) any competitor, whether old or brand spankin’ new.

In this week’s blog, we’re going to explain the benefits your business can experience from having a site redesign with optimization.

When does a website need a redesign?

Considering the internet is going to continue to evolve, websites generally need a redesign every two to three years in order to stay competitive.

Here are 14 benefits of website redesign:

1. Customer perception of your business will be positive because they feel they can trust seeing your brand in person, and on your website, social media, and emails as looking consistent and recognizable.

2. Everyone likes new things – having a well-functioning and extremely informative new website gives the perception the business is doing well in our economy, and people should continue to utilize your company.

3. Having a new style/layout of your site is seriously more trustworthy to consumers than having old and outdated website styles that don’t match your brand (logo changes, product changes, etc)

4. Boost morale within your company from clients and employees, which would be proud to share the updates

5. Adding new, relevant and useful content will only boost your rankings in search engine results pages

6. Since we’re creating relevant and useful content, we will have more control over the content that is in our pages and on our site

7. Increase of conversion rates due to your new relevant and useful content, responsive site layout/design, and optimization techniques that lead a customer to buy

8. Increase your users interaction and their experience (UI/UX) on your website, which increase its usability and flexibility

9. Decreases site load times which reduce your visitor’s bounce rate considering human attention spans in 2020 last less than 7 seconds

10. Increases usability and flexibility within your organization too, especially those involved with marketing

11. Gives visitors the option of sharing your site in multiple ways, like on social media platforms or just by word-of-mouth

12. The quality and volume of leads generated by organic traffic to your site will only increase due to your relevant and useful content

13. Allows the ability to integrate with new or your existing software, so you don’t waste the money you’ve already spent on software

14. Lastly, redesigning your website gives you a chance for a new start.  All the content you’ve created over the lifetime of your website is a valuable contribution, both written content and images. Sometimes only minor edits needs to be done, then it can be included on your new site.

The two most important parts to remember when doing a site redesign are:

1. Fully comprehend why you are doing a site redesign in the first place (it’s old, it’s slow, it’s ugly, the written content is non-descriptive, confusing, misleading, redundant, etc.), and

2. To plan the redesign, keeping user experience and site functionality as your modus operandi.

Website redesign can make or break your business, so redesign your site for the right reasons, and choose the right people to complete the work for you.

Don’t waste your money or your time, and also don’t plan on your business being or staying competitive if you aren’t going to create, again, relevant and useful content for which your visitors are searching.

It’s simple: an optimized website earns more traffic from searches, hands-down. The traffic that comes from performing a search online,or organic traffic, is the best converting traffic your website will ever encounter simply because the person is searching for what you happen to offer on your website.

For Instance

Let’s say you have a brand new, responsive, and beautiful looking furniture website. You haven’t had the time to write custom descritions of the products, you’ve been running your business! We can appreciate your hard work, but customers don’t think about how hard the business owner works, they are wondering how tall and how deep that computer desk is they found on your site.

If you don’t have beneficial information the customer may need about the product, even it’s dimensions, you aren’t going to convert any site visits to actual sales. This most certainly impacts the buying cycle, and your bottom line. Including something as simple as the dimensions to a desk you sell can convert a sale. Why? Because its seriously relevant and useful information when we shop online and not in person! Even in person we want to know how tall or how deep a computer desk is so it fits in the space we decided upon. At least in person you can try to find a store employee who knows the answer. You can try. The employee may not know the answer. Make sure your website is NOT that employee.

Is Search Engine Optimization still important?

Let’s think about the big picture here:

• As long as people continue to buy online, SEO is relevant
• As long as people continue to use search engines to find things on the internet, SEO is relevant
• As long as people continue to be entrepreneurs, or create websites online, especially potential competitors to your business, yes, SEO is still relevant

And, utilizing paid search/running ads online can produce the quick results you desire, but can also seem to lack authenticity, especially if the site for the ad isn’t optimized.

NOTE: You should only do paid ads if you’re also doing SEO on your site.

Things to remember when performing site optimization:

• Ranking #1 doesn’t always mean more traffic due to ads and snippets available at the very top of the first search engine result page. People aren’t going to pay for ads on 2^nd and 3^rd search engine result pages simply because who really visits those pages when buying online? Maybe for research projects, but not when they want to find a service or product to purchase
• Focus on optimizing your content for your visitors, not search engine robots. Instead of focusing on just being #1 in SERPs, focus on maximizing your Click Through Rate (CTR) and reducing your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). Read our blog about How to Reduce Your Online Marketing Campaign’s Cost Per Acquisition here.
• Do A/B Testing of your site’s optimized pages and optimized social media posts.
• Don’t keyword stuff your site’s content. If your optimized content doesn’t read well when you’re writing the content, then the customer won’t be able to read it well either forcing the customer to leave (hence: bounce rate) and possibly go to your competitor. There goes a possible sale because you were optimizing for search engines, not people.
• Search Engines are becoming more and more intuitive as the internet evolves, so your content seriously needs to be relevant and useful to your audience. It doesn’t have to be optimized for any one specific keyword, as long as it’s relevant to the page. Pro Tip: use a thesaurus, but remember to keep the content understandable
• The products, services, and content on your website should be easy to find, easy to read, and solve customer’s questions or problems which will create an even better user experience
• Know that if your site only has 3 pages, that’s totally okay. Don’t think your website has to have a ton of pages just to get your message across. Google doesn’t rate the quality of a website as a whole, just each individual page is evaluated. Why? For relevance and usability
• Focus focus focus Thon creating quality, relevant, useful content that can actually help someone visiting your site

There’s nothing wrong with you wanting to create the content for your website, if you have the time to learn all the ins and outs of website design and development. We do this stuff for a living! We love it and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Contact us for help!

As the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding! See below about the Case Study we composed to illustrate how Website Redesign and Search Engine Optimization can benefit a website, like one of our recent clients.

 

 

Our dear client was stuck in a rut and not getting any new students to contact her or sign up for her CNA classes, which happens to be a highly sought-after program to offer individuals here in Jacksonville, Florida.  Our client had good intentions and efforts to build her brand, but we knew our Developers could help her increase site visits, customer calls, emails, office visits, and the number of students who finally enrolled. Spoiler alert: her conversions increased exponentially.