Your website speaks of your identity. Research suggests that most of the buyers judge a company's credibility by their website.
If you don't have a great website, generating leads or increasing sales would be a tough job for you.
However, if you are pondering over the thought of website redesign to allure the customers and potential clients more effectively, there is a set of strategies that you must consider before embarking on the project.
You might be thinking that website redesigning is all about making it look good and attractive, so why there is any need of following a website redesign strategy?
Source: codedgeservices
However, spending thousands of dollars and getting a brand new layout or CMS with a modern and splashy look aren't going to work if you can't communicate your value propositions clearly or make a great first impression on your prospective clients.
To convert customers, reduce bounce rates and increase sales, you got to focus on customer needs.
Website redesign is often a tedious and long process and to make it worthwhile you must start with a clear vision or a definite problem that needs to be solved. The better you define your vision, the more fruitful you redesigning efforts will be.
Whether you are redesigning your website in-house or are hiring a website designing company, strategize your process so that you can better track your progress and achieve goals efficiently.
Here are the things that you must consider before embarking on a website redesign project:
Existing Site's Performance
Before beginning the website redesigning, document the current performance metrics. Analyze the existing site on areas like amount of sales generated per month, number of pages receiving traffic, bounce rate, top performing keywords etc.
Source: GTMetrix
Use tools for tracking the website performance and also make a note of them as you would require them to compare the post design metrics.
See Also: Improve your Website's Performance with 5 Simple Tools
Objectives
Determine the sales and marketing goals of your website. Analyze how exactly your website can help you to increase sales. Set realistic, measurable and specific goals.
Consider how you can increase traffic to specific product pages, increase conversion rates or increase blog subscribers.
Once you figure out how you want your website to accomplish the specific goals and measure success, you can provide better instructions to the web design company on how to redesign your website.
Traffic Source
Interview buyers to know what is the typical source of information for them pertaining to their industry. This helps to determine the channels for driving traffic and also to decide the tone of your website.
Use analytics to find out when the visitors reach your website, which page are they visiting the most or where are they clicking the most.
There are tools that give you numbers so that you can map the visitors journey and figure out conversion rates. In this way you can find and redesign the elements on your website that are driving traffic.
Information
A beautiful website isn't useful if it isn't moving visitors ahead in the sales cycle. This needs a thorough understanding of how your potential customers are finding you and what they expect on your website.
Customers often visit websites multiple times before requesting a consultation or making a purchase. They might also look for feed-backs or some sort of convincing from the higher level.
Some of your potential clients may receive information about your website from a primary buyer, without visiting the website. They are known as secondary personas.
Think about what information is needed on the website to help both primary and secondary personas.
Buyer Concerns
While optimizing the sales cycle, figure out the concerns of your buyers. Address those concerns and redesign your website in a way that ensures valuable content on each page.
Discuss with your customers about the things that delay their decision or what kind of information they look for validation.
Your sales team can help you to figure out what are the questions that potential buyers usually ask and what resources they share with visitors to answer their query.
In this way you can determine what elements you need on your website to make the buyers confident about your offerings.
Competitor Websites
It is extremely important to know what's your position in the competitive market. Type your services into Google search and see what names come up other than yours.
Perform in-depth analysis of your competitors and find out the most appealing elements on their website, from design as well as content perspective.
Work on how you can make your products and services sound more appealing.
Branding
Website redesigning is an excellent opportunity to refresh your value proposition. The message you convey through your homepage banner makes the first impression on visitors.
Put efforts to make your website distinct, so that it conveys the appropriate feelings and encourages the visitors to become buyers.
Apart from products and services highlight what extra you are offering to the visitors. Is it cost savings, efficiency or reliance?
Focus on the big picture and design your website in such a way that it bridges that gap between you and the potential customers.
See Also: 10 Creative Steps for Designing Brand Identity
Search Engine Optimization
To improve your site's performance, it's important to improve the visibility of your website.
Use analytics to find out which are the best performing pages on your website and if you want to move any of these pages, ensure creating a proper 301 redirect. This helps in retaining traffic and link value of a given page.
Do extensive keyword research and optimize the content accordingly. If needed, add new content and pages to your website that focus on popular keywords. Analyze and work on various on-page elements.
Search engine optimization is very important if you want to generate leads and increase sales.
See Also: How to Do a Complete SEO Audit of Your Website
Preparing the right strategy is the most important and foremost stage of website redesigning process. Once you complete this stage, the process becomes easier and you can confidently chalk out the necessary alterations.
A great strategy leads to better planning, designing, building, optimizing, launching and analyzing of the new website, each of which ultimately helps your business grow.
See Also: UX and SEO Tips That Will Make Your Website Google Friendly