Creating a new website is a major endeavor. When you tell clients that they’ll need to launch a new SEO strategy at the same time, they may be less than pleased. However, this is the best option. The trick, then, is to convince your clients of the same thing.
First of all, you need to make it clear to your clients why they need a website at all. Some people may think they can grow their business without a website. This is true — but only to a very small extent. If your clients have any ambition of gaining new customers, expanding their range of products or services, or increasing profits, just having social media accounts is not going to cut it. These tips will teach you why a new website redesign is important to SEO.
When sites are outdated, the next challenge is to create a new design from scratch. You’ll need to draw your attention to the benefits of creating a website over just refurbishing a current site.
The main advantage is that you’ll have absolute control over the SEO. This is because you’ll be able to design the site from the ground up with current SEO trends in mind. This is far more effective than finding areas of the site that need work and optimizing them. Starting from the beginning may even take less time. For instance, you’ll be able to focus on:
Readability - Ensure that search engines are able to crawl content and rank it in the appropriate searches.
Navigation - As you add more pages to a site, navigation can become complex. By redesigning the site, you can ensure that pages are no more than four clicks from the homepage.
Design for Content - When you know what types of content will be on your site and which pages will be the most important, you can design your website around them. This is better than trying to fit content on a site once the website is complete.
Responsive Design - Sites that were built several years ago may not appear properly on every device. Starting a website from scratch includes thinking about responsive design and testing to ensure that pages fit every design type and screen size.
Once you have made the above clear, you can move on to why the website needs to be infused with SEO from the start. There are several points you can use for your argument.
Part of search engine optimization is about targeting the right audience. This means learning about your customers and creating content for each buyer persona at each stage of the sales funnel. This will drive the right traffic to your website and generate leads.
Users expect a pleasant experience when they arrive at your website. If you fail to take UX into account, users will leave without consuming any content. This ruins your chances of snagging a lead. Plus, when search engines notice a higher bounce rate and shorter average time on site, they will penalize your site by giving it lower rankings in the search results.
When you create content for SEO, you focus on quality, readability, and keyword optimization. Furthermore, having SEO part of your long-term strategy will mean releasing such content on a regular basis. Users will appreciate this and search engines will reward you for it.
If your competitors are using an effective SEO strategy, you’ll need to have one, too — to stay competitive. If they’re ignoring SEO, you’ll have the upper hand.
When a site takes too long to load, users leave. This is the case even if users have already spent some time browsing your site and consuming content. Only one page has to be slow loading for users to leave without becoming a lead. Developers who are under pressure to just finish a website may write code that doesn’t have an optimal loading speed. You can avoid this problem by designing with SEO in mind.
Keep in mind that Google’s new ranking approach relies heavily on page speeds moving forward.
After making all the above points, you may be concerned that starting a website from scratch and beginning a new SEO strategy could mean you’ll lose current SEO value. Be assured, this will not be the case. You can ensure that you maintain existing SEO value by properly utilizing redirects and by saving their best content for new pages.
Once you see all the facts for what they are you will not be able to object to combining a new website with a fresh SEO strategy. Then, you’ll be able to find success with all your digital marketing efforts.
