A successful website redesign isn’t just about design. It’s actually about giving your content a great place to live so it can engage your audience and grow your business. It’s not difficult to understand, but takes a lot of effort to deliver. When you imagine a redesign project team, you probably picture your web and marketing staff, and possibly a design agency. Adding an SEO firm to your website redesign team is a great way of sharing the project workload, but that’s not the biggest benefit. Engaging with SEO experts during your project maximizes the impact of your redesign by ensuring your content will perform strongly in search, and drive more traffic to your new website.
The Best Time to Hire an SEO Firm
Your website is the digital hub of your business, and getting found is critical to staying in business. Having enough SEO expertise to perform well in search is always valuable, whether that knowledge comes from your team or a firm. If you follow SEO best practices, you know that search engines don’t share too much knowledge, and a best practice one day (think meta keywords or Google Authorship) is meaningless the next. SEOs focused on discovering, testing, and mastering this evolving science are best equipped to assess your website’s needs, and deliver the most up-to-date solutions. This is especially true if you’re in a highly competitive market and your visibility is partly determined by the quality of your competitors’ SEO. If you’ve decided a new website design is a worthwhile investment for your business, there’s no better time to invest in SEO as well. In fact, it might be short-sighted not to.
Optimize for Search Before Launching
Whether you hope to reuse existing content or create completely new content, your SEO firm can be instrumental in ensuring it’s optimized. From selecting target keywords, to conducting a content audit, to writing effective meta titles and descriptions, to recommending cross-linking opportunities, you can rely on your SEO firm to ensure you get the most value out of each page on your site. Creating a new information architecture for your website is another required step in the redesign process, and your SEO firm will help you structure site navigation and content in a way that helps future visitors find what they want and lets search engines know how to do the same. Content aside, your SEO firm can also find and flag any technical issues that could hurt your website’s ranking or performance once it goes live.
Get Smart About Measuring Outcomes
Setting measurable goals for your redesigned website helps your team understand whether you’re reaching the desired outcomes. If website metrics are still new to you, there’s no better partner than your SEO firm to help capture benchmarks you can measure against, and to help you interpret analytics data. SEO firms are experts at demonstrating ROI and developing metrics for success because so many businesses are still reluctant to invest in them.
Maximize Search Performance from Day One
Launching a new or redesigned website is one of the most exciting projects a business can embark on, but it’s also often the most time and resource-consuming project you might get your boss to approve. Seeing quick returns on this massive investment requires a great clarity of purpose, and ability to execute on the strategies required to reach your goals. An SEO firm can be an invaluable partner in ensuring your newly launched site is ready to step up your online marketing game, and help ensure peak performance day after day, quarter after quarter, and year after year.
