6 Simple Tips to Increase Your Traffic During Website Redesign

Brace for impact!

The company wants a website overhaul. Even worse, you are in dire need to redesign your own website – the one you’ve built for years.

What should you do? There are plenty of factors to worry about especially on the SEO department. It’s not like redesigning a room or something. Website redesigning is always crucial. It can drastically increase your organic traffic. But it can also snap it into dust like nothing.

Transitioning into a new and improved website should be exciting. But the impending danger always looms. This is the world of SEO where the need for a website redesign is constant. You have to keep up to the pace. Otherwise, you can easily be left out in the digital hunger games.

But don’t freak out!

It’s not too late to reconsider your new design. Sometimes, the simplest tweaks are the most effective. You just have to pay due diligence and focus on more important stuff.

Now read carefully. Here are some simple tips you can follow to increase your traffic when redesigning your website.

1. Define Your Goals Clearly

Why are you redesigning your website in the first place?

Every successful website redesigning starts with good planning. You have to define your strategies and goals clearly before executing them.

Does your business need to jumpstart its brand reputation? Do you want to convert your traffic into customers? Are you going to retain your traffic or improve it further?

2. Optimize Your Website Content

Aside from the website interface, content also plays an important role to drive traffic into your website.

The best websites don’t just sell, they educate and produce loyal visitors.

People don’t want to read lengthy contents; they skim through sites looking for useful information. But when they find one, that’s your sweet spot.

Putting blogs on your website is a great way to boost your SEO quality. It signals to search engines that your website contains relevant answers to the specific questions.

Keywords and links, on the other hand, is an indispensable ingredient to further broaden your website’s reach. Sprinkle relevant keywords and links all over your contents, but never overdo it.

Never forget your mobile platform. Smartphones are taking over the world, so might as well take advantage of this trend. Always consider the readability of your content for mobile users. Format your content for scanning and small screens. Use bullets, subheadings, and infographic pictures.

You can also create different content formats such as slide shares, short videos, and pictures. The goal is to make your content as bite-size as possible.

3. Check Your SEO Efforts

Don’t be daunted by the technical stuff. There are a lot of tools you can use to assist you with your website redesigning journey. Here are some things you should consider.

Keyword Research and Mapping

This one is easy. It’s just borrowing keywords from high-ranking websites.

Make a list of all the keyword searches in the highest ranking pages. Place them in a spreadsheet. Write down the core keywords from each page and their search volume per month. Also, Consider the relevance of these keywords to your articles and the specific questions they answer. Use all these data and information when applying SEO campaigns to your website.

Search Engine Friendly Permalinks

Permalink structure is very important when transitioning into a redesigned website. Never change your permalink structure without enough knowledge about it.

Improper permalink structure could confuse search engines, which can make your website’s ranking to plummet. Make further research on how you can improve your permalinks depending on your website and posts.

Check Mobile Compatibility

More people are using their phones to browse the internet. Google puts the most mobile-friendly website at the top of SERP. But how can you make your website mobile-friendly? The key is in the responsiveness of your design to the mobile platform. Powering your website to fit on any size of the screen is crucial to get that mobile friendliness score on your side.

See Page Speed Score

Website redesigning gives you the opportunity to boost your site’s performance. Pro tip: use tools suggested by Google to help webmasters to improve their website performance.

These tools offer suggestions to make your website perform faster. They analyze the contents of your site and use the data to fix different kinds of problems that impede its speed.

4. Strategize Your Call-To-Actions

Call to actions are not just for marketing strategy. Creating one for your website means a lot to your audience’s psychology.

You can apply your call to actions to your contents. It forms a large part in your traffic conversion, especially when you have a very unique phrase with a cool design. The most effective call to action phrases is brief and specific which can attract your visitors to just click that beautiful button.

Proper placement also matters. Placing it at the end of the blog article could be your best bet. However, it is more effective to put your CTAs when the content reaches its peak of interest.

5. Properly Redirect the Pages

When you need to replace a page, most web-designers tend to create a new page linked to the original site. Other designers use redirects when adding a new website to the original one. Whatever your reason, you should do it correctly.

Improper redirects can affect the user experience and make your audience leave your website prematurely. Never overlook this part of the equation as it can also affect your referral traffic and Google ranking.

6. Manage How Your Organic Traffic Behaves

All the aforementioned website redesigning elements can cause a drop in your traffic such as improper redirects, mobile phone incompatibility, misuse of CTAs, overall site structure, and many more. But there are many ways to fix these problems, especially when you are still in the middle of the process.

Webmasters use tools to monitor traffic behavior and gather data for future use.

Analytic tools are used to understand traffic. During the redesigning process, it is essential to use these data to address problems, apply the right designs, and adapt to the current situation.

Redesigning your website needs a lot of work.

But the reward for doing it right is priceless and worth all the efforts you’ve invested in it. Armed with the right knowledge, you can easily slide through the transition with ease and a surefire success.

About the Author

John Vuong is the sole owner of Local SEO Search Inc, who also in houses talented web designers in Toronto to improve your website. John’s mission is to help local business owners improve their online influence so they can dominate their industry. With his business acumen and innate understanding of the local business landscape, John writes blogs that delve on how to customize SEO campaigns based on client needs.