What to Avoid in Your Redesign: Not thinking about SEO from the very beginning

Website Planning SEOIs it time to give your website a redesign? Updating your website with a fresh new look may seem an interesting and fun challenge, but don’t get lost in the flashy aesthetics. It’s of equal importance to update what goes on behind the screen as well. When you design your site, people need to be able to easily navigate through your site and be able to find you in search. If they can’t do that, no amount of appealing visuals is going to save you. 

Form and function go hand in hand, so by all means, design your heart out, but keep in mind that the function needs a facelift as well. What do we mean by this? It may not seem exciting, but you need to design for search engine optimization too. In this blog series, we’ll discuss ten mistakes you should avoid in your next website design.

Not thinking about SEO from the very beginning

When you get excited about a project, it’s pretty easy to get lost in the cosmetic details and conveniently let it slip that there are behind the scenes details to remember. Who cares about nitty gritty details such as SEO when you are designing big colorful buttons, flashy banners, and painstakingly choosing just the right photos. Stop! If you build a beautiful website, but no one can find you, what was the point? Rope yourself back in a little bit and ingrain in your brain that SEO NEEDS to be a part of your redesign strategy from the get go. 

A structure is only as sturdy as its foundation and the same goes with your website. Start at the very foundation and think about how people will discover your website and how accessible your website will be to people once they find it. Everything from title tags, meta descriptions, keywords, content, etc. needs to be carefully thought out from the beginning if you hope to make a success of your website. 

We can’t say it enough - don’t remember SEO  when it’s too late. Don’t wait until the site is being coded or even heading for a launch date. It needs to be part of the drawn up plans in the very beginning. Remember, form AND function are paired together for a reason. A visually stunning website is only as good as the function behind it.