What to Avoid in your Redesign: No audit of your existing site

Website AuditNow that we have it firmly cemented in our brain that SEO has to be involved in the redesign process from the very beginning, we can now move on to the second mistake many people make and what you now will know to avoid.

Once we get an idea into our head, it’s all hands on deck and we immediately want to tear down the old and start the new. But calm those itchy fingers for just a minute. Before you completely demolish your site, take time to go through it and find out what is working with your site and what isn’t. There are a few key factors that you can look at:

  • Number of visits/visitors/unique visitors (on a monthly average)
  • What are your top keywords - think in terms of what keywords you are ranking for, how did people find you, traffic generation, etc.
  • Number of inbound linking domains
  • How many pages do you have indexed
  • Total number of pages that actually receive traffic

Once you’ve done your audit, you will see where the work needs to be done. Do you have any pages that seem to have no purpose or have no traffic? If so, get rid of them! Did you find pages that are stuffed with keywords? Time to reassess and write up some fresh content. Perhaps you have some pages that have drawn high traffic volume. These are the pages that you will really want to integrate onsite SEO to gain the most advantage and drive further traffic and conversions. 

This can be a painstaking process, but it’s worth it! It will help ensure that important pages are not deleted with the new layout, weak pages can be updated or deleted altogether, and most important, you now have a detailed knowledge of your website. This will be helpful to you as you move forward with your redesign and implement the function that will make your website a winning success.