How to Develop a Website Redesign Strategy That Guarantees Results

So ... you want to redesign your website. A redesign can be a huge success -- or a total flop. It can also be a long and tedious undertaking, which is why every redesign needs to start with a clear vision and/or problem to solve. And the better you are at defining that vision at the very beginning, the more successful your redesign will be -- and the smoother the entire process will be as well.

That's why we set out to create a helpful guide and worksheet that any inbound marketer can use to plan a successful website redesign. Whether you’re working with an agency or redesigning your site in house, our guide will help you strategize your website redesign, and the accompanying tracking worksheet will enable you to track your progress as you move beyond strategy and into each stage of your redesign.

We've identified seven steps of website redesign: strategy, plan, design, build, optimize, launch, and analyze. But none of the latter six stages will be effective without putting a lot of focus on that first stage: strategy. Let's go into detail about what you should consider at the strategy stage so you can embark on a website redesign that turns out to be a huge success -- not a total flop. And don't forget to download your website redesign planning kit so you can follow along in the worksheet! 

STEP 1: BENCHMARK YOUR CURRENT METRICS

Before you begin planning your redesign, document your current performance metrics. Start by analyzing your existing site over its history in areas such as:

• Number of visits/visitors/unique visitors (monthly average)
• Bounce rate (monthly average)
• Time on site (monthly average)
• Top-performing keywords (in terms of rank, traffic, and lead generation)
• Number of inbound linking domains
• Total number of new leads/form submissions (per month)
• Total amount of sales generated (per month)
• Total number of pages indexed
• Total number of pages that receive traffic

If you don’t have access to this information, then I absolutely recommend adding tools like Google Analytics and HubSpot’s Marketing Analytics for better tracking and visibility into your website's performance.

Furthermore, make note of which tools you used to identify each of these particular benchmarks. Ideally, you’ll want to use those same exact tools when collecting post-design metrics. Otherwise, you’ll be comparing apples to oranges!

STEP 2: DETERMINE YOUR WEBSITE REDESIGN GOALS

When considering a redesign, there should always be a good reason behind it. We speak with a lot of marketers at HubSpot, and we often hear flimsy reasoning like “it’s been a while since we’ve done one,” or "my competitor just did a redesign." These reasons just aren't good enough. Remember: It’s not just about how your site looks, but rather how it works. Be really clear about why you’re doing the redesign in the first place, and tie those goals to measureable results. Then communicate your goals with your team, designer, or agency. Consider the following data-driven objectives for your own website:

• Increasing number of visits/visitors
• Reducing bounce rate
• Increasing time on site
• Improving domain authority
• Increasing number of new leads/form submissions
• Increasing total amount of sales generated
• Enhancing current SEO rankings for important keywords

Many of these metrics-driving goals are dependent on one other. For example, in order to generate more conversions, you may also need to increase traffic while decreasing your site's bounce rate.

STEP 3: DEFINE YOUR BRANDING & MESSAGING

Before you begin crafting your new website design and content, you need to be crystal clear about your desired branding, messaging, and your unique value proposition so it’s consistent across your entire website. A new visitor should immediately understand what you do, how it relates to them, and why they should stay on your site and not flee to your competitors'.

Think about whether you plan to change your branding and/or messaging, of if it will stay the same? If you plan to change it, what about it needs to change? Answer these questions within your website redesign planning worksheet so you can keep these changes top of mind while you embark on the rest of your redesign.

As you're developing your messaging, use clear, concise language, and avoid using industry jargon (AKA gobbledygook) that makes you sound more like a business babbling robot than a human. Consider the following example of how we could describe HubSpot in a gobbledygook way:

HubSpot helps companies across multiple countries reduce churn by backfilling the sales pipeline with highly qualified traffic that generates leads that convert into customers with high lifetime value. We achieve this by providing leading-edge software that integrates all marketing channels for a synergistic view of the data that determines and prioritizes high-value marketing activities.

Say what? Let’s translate that into the way people actually speak:

HubSpot’s all-in-one marketing software helps more than 6,000 businesses in 45 countries attract leads and convert them into customers. A pioneer in inbound marketing, HubSpot aims to help its customers make marketing that people actually love.

Ahh yes ... much clearer!

STEP 4: DEFINE YOUR BUYER PERSONA(S)

Your website is not just about you. And when your visitors land on your website, they're asking themselves, “What’s in it for me?” Speak to them in their language by strategizing your design and content around your business' buyer personas. A buyer persona is a theoretical manifestation of your business' ideal customers. They are fictional representations based on real data about customer demographics and online behavior, along with educated speculation about their personal histories, motivations, and concerns.

For instance, if you're a marketing manager at a hotel who is looking to bring in new business, you might target five different buyer personas: an independent business traveler, a corporate travel manager, an event planner, a vacationing family, and a couple planning their wedding reception.

Make sure you clearly identify your buyer personas so you can shape your website redesign strategy around the website visitors that matter most to you. For help with this, check out our handy buyer personas template -- and accompanying blog post -- to help you research and create detailed buyer personas.

Is your target audience changing as part of your website redesign? Does your branding and content align with this audience? Answer these questions as you're strategizing your redesign.

Then check out our comprehensive article about how to design a persona-centric website experience for more on the subject.

STEP 5: PROTECT YOUR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZED PAGES

Getting found online is essential to improving the rest of your site's metrics. If no one is coming to your site, how can you increase new leads, reconversions, or sales? Here are some tips to designing your new website with SEO in mind:

Document your most search-valued pages.

Use your marketing analytics to figure out which pages receive the most traffic and inbound links, convert the most leads, and ultimately cover the most influential topics in your industry. If you plan to move any of these highly valuable pages, make sure you create the proper 301 redirects.

Create a 301 redirect strategy.

Speaking of 301 redirects, this is extremely important in terms of retaining the traffic and link value associated with a given page. Create a spreadsheet to record and map out your 301 redirects (old URLs vs. new URLs). Then hand this document over to someone technical for proper implementation.

Do your keyword research.

For every page on your newly designed site, pick one keyword/topic that the page will focus on. Once you determine the keyword(s), use on-page SEO best practices (use this on-page SEO template to help!) to optimize the pages on your website. Furthermore, consider adding new content and pages to your website that address those particular keywords and topics that are neglected on your current site.

STEP 6: ANALYZE THE COMPETITION

While we don’t recommend obsessing over your competitors, it can help to know how you compare. Run your website through HubSpot's free Marketing Grader tool to generate a report card of how your website and marketing is performing. (Or, if you're already a HubSpot customer, use our Competitors tool.) Use these diagnostic tools to evaluate your competitors' websites as well, so you're aware of their strengths and weaknesses.

Next, take a look at your competitors' websites, and take note of what you like -- and what you don’t. This is not meant to make you a copycat, but rather to help you realize what you can do better. Once you conduct your analysis, put together a list of action items highlighting some areas for improvement and what you can do differently than your competitors. For more information, check out our comprehensive blog post about how to conduct a competitive analysis.

STEP 7: TAKE INVENTORY OF YOUR HIGH-PERFORMING ASSETS

While a redesign is a great way to improve the performance of your website, unfortunately, there are also countless ways in which it can hurt you. Your existing website likely contains many high-performing assets that you've already built up, and losing their effectiveness because of a redesign can severely damage your marketing results. For instance, such assets might include your:

• Most shared or viewed content
• High-trafficked pages
• Best performing/ranking keywords and associated pages
• Number of inbound links to individual pages

For example, if you end up removing a page from your site that has accumulated a high number of inbound links, you could potentially lose a lot of SEO credit, which will make it increasingly difficult for you to get found in search. Keep in mind that many web designers don’t consider this step because they are neither marketers nor SEO specialists. Don’t hesitate to remind them about this step, and help them along by auditing your site and providing them with a list and strategy for maintaining or updating critical pages on your site.

Once you've completed the strategy stage, you'll be much better prepared for a successful website redesign. Now you're ready to plan, design, build, optimize, launch, and analyze your new website -- with the help of our worksheet of course ;-)

Is the Marketing Campaign Dead?

For years, I've believed that the notion of a marketing 'campaign' is dead. And I’m not the only one who thinks it. In the words of Joseph Jaffe, “Marketing is not a campaign, it's a commitment.” And Eric Wheeler wrote in the AdAge article "Ad Campaigns Are Dead," “Power has shifted away from brands to consumers ... Suddenly, it's no longer about the campaign.”

Paul Dunay has written, "there is no campaign in social media," while Joe Pulizzi said in a video interview that "content marketing is not a campaign, it is a promise to our customers." Even Bill Lee, in his Harvard Business Review article, "Marketing Is Dead," said, "Traditional marketing may be dead, but the new possibilities of peer influence-based, community-oriented marketing ..." (which some of us might call 'inbound marketing' ... wink wink) “... hold much greater promise for creating sustained growth through authentic customer relationships.”

Finally, three years ago, Brian Halligan wrote in his 2010 marketing wish list, "My blood curdles every time I hear someone talk about doing a 'social media campaign' or 'blog campaign.' Blogs and social media behave like compound interest, so if you treat them like 'campaigns,' you lose all the benefits. Marketers should be permanently creating, optimizing, promoting, converting, and analyzing."

So, if the marketing campaign is dead, why is it dead, and what do we do now? Let’s start off with some of the reasons why it's dead ...

Campaigns are temporary, but today, the internet is forever.

Traditionally, ads would last as long as you paid for them to be aired on TV or printed in a newspaper or magazine. Now, people can read your blog posts from 2006 and watch your music videos from 2007. So what exactly does this mean? Well, it means that you might not want to use an animated lizard in a campaign for six months, and then use a spotted dog in some ads for the next three months ... and then use a talking baby in some ads for the next four months. Consistency and commitment to your brand, message, and voice is increasingly important when all the content you've ever created is completely accessible to anyone at any time. If you're all about the talking babies campaign now but what pops up for people in Google is lizard videos, are you really promoting the campaign you think you are?

Campaigns are about you, but today, (inbound) marketing is about the customer.

Marketing used to involve a company deciding what they wanted to brainwash their potential buyers with, and then programming that message into advertisements they would force feed to people because they had no choice. Now, the consumer is in control. Consumers have more and more technologies like DVRs, caller ID, and spam blockers that enable them to avoid unwanted advertising and messages. This means that, in order to get their attention, you have to earn their permission. As a result, your marketing needs to be about them, not you -- at least until they trust you enough to want to know more about you and your products. If your campaigns are about what your company wants to tell people, then you’re doing inbound marketing backwards.

Campaigns are planned and slow, but today, conversation is dynamic and responsive.

In the old world of marketing, you could run a campaign of ads that promoted your product, and then you could turn off all of your marketing for a while. You could stop and start on a whim. Today, once you start engaging with people, they expect you to be there in the future. And when you do inbound marketing right, you become a publisher or a media company for your industry. Imagine if you started publishing a business blog, or engaging with potential customers on Facebook, and then one day you just stopped showing up? In today’s inbound world, that would be akin to a TV network going off the air one day just because they got lazy. Sure, you can do it -- but it is not a great idea. People expect responses when they contact you on your website or blog or in social media, and when they subscribe to something you publish, they expect to get regular updates on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis -- whatever you promised them. Joseph Jaffe is right. "Marketing is a commitment."

What next? Where do I go from here?  

Start by making a commitment to inbound marketing. Stop the madness of coming up with an entirely new theme and creative concept every three months. Start having a long-term view of your brand, message, and voice -- and what value your company can add to your industry. Stop blasting and interrupting people with advertisements about you. Start being helpful and interesting. Start listening. Start communicating. Start publishing. Stop advertising. Start marketing.

What do you think? Is the marketing campaign dead?

Shoppers Put Big Demands on Social Media

CONSUMERS looking for an instant response to their inquiries and complaints are turning to social media sites in their droves.

Gerd Schenkel, executive director of Telstra Digital, says the number of round-the-clock staff waiting to deal with customer inquiries has grown six-fold in the past 12 months.

"The live chat is growing very strongly because our digital channels as a whole are growing," he says.

"The growth rate for live chat is up about 600 per cent from last year to this year and this month we expect to offer about 140,000 chat sessions with our customers."

Time-poor Australians are among those who use social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to have their queries answered at a quicker rate, rather than phone or send an email.

Schenkel says Telstra now has several hundred employees working in their chat team to deal with real-time online customer inquiries.

"Live chat is often more convenient for customers because they are already on the website or they're already on a mobile," he says.

"They've seen a bill or a product and they have a question about it, so we find it easier for many customers to just click a button and have a quick chat session as opposed to making a phone call."

Self-employed massage therapist Belinda McLeod, 39, recently used social media to interact with her telecommunications company after having some problems with her broadband connection.

"I get frustrated when I contact call centres and am put on hold for half an hour," she says. "I couldn't find instant messaging and the customer service wasn't open on Sunday, but there were people online.

"I thought by raising issues publicly (on Twitter) they would do something about it."

She says the telco responded to her query on Twitter several hours later.

Matt Travers is the founder of new comparison website ServiceRage, which analyses customer feedback, and says the growing presence of social media is forcing companies to deal with customers in the public domain.

"Anyone can see an exchange happening between the company and the individual if they are using Twitter or Facebook," he says. "The balance of power is in the consumer's favour. Now more than ever it's important for companies to deliver good service."

Google Penguin Update Will Affect Many SEO Companies, Marketing Expert Fiona Lewis Believes

It is true that many (and major) SEO companies have grown complacent during the last years and that they have been optimizing for search engines in ways that are not very Googthodox.

However, this month a new announcement came from Google and the phrase which is now terrifying the World Wide Web is ‘you don’t want the next Penguin update’, uttered by Matt Cutts, Google specialist in SEO issues.

While nobody knows what he really means, Fiona Lewis and many other internet marketing experts are already wondering about the future of SEO companies who have been cheating their ways into good rankings.

The update has already received several nicknames such as ‘Googageddon’ or ‘carnage’, but the latter seems to resonate the most with people. When asked about her opinion on this denomination, Ms Lewis answered, “It will be carnage for many companies and business owners. I feel sorry especially for the businesses that pay good money to slack SEO companies who didn't see this coming.”

According to Ms Lewis, SEO companies have about three months to get things straight with their practices before their clients will start noticing problems. Fiona Lewis puts the blame on the SEOers who have been lazily crawling their clients’ websites to the top: “The worst part is that they have been doing bad practise for so long and were lazy, and business owners trust the SEO companies are doing the right thing.”

What seems to be the end of many SEO companies, will be, however, a good thing for those using Google as their search engine. It is predicted that Google will show random or unexpected results which will not affect the everyday user, but it will affect a website’s ranking.

In a nutshell, while internet users will not suffer from this update, it is the SEO companies and their clients who will have to deal with the consequences.

Ms Lewis highlights the importance of having a “real business, with real influence, that interacts with its clients – real people – and is active online. 

I admit that at sometimes this new approach to SEO can be a bit frustrating and I am sure that many internet marketers will pass through some hard times switching to these new methods. I’m already doing everything Google wants, but that doesn’t mean that I can pull my hair down and relax. SEO will never be about laziness and relaxation.”