Website Rebuilds, Is it Time for your Site to get an update?
The beginning of this year as been filled with web site rebuilds and content updates for many clients. This works is our current focus and a part of the typical customer journey with their online presence. It is also informing and changing the way we build new sites, as well as rebuilding existing sites.
What Makes A Rebuild Necessary?
The average customer journey to getting a website established follows a certain path.
- Start a business and you’ll need a website.
- Try to build it yourself (Wix, SquareSpace, Weebly, etc) or hire a web developer.
- Now, the biggest issue. You need to put up content, so the business owner will typically write the content. This content is often writing from the wrong perspective and has not been researched for their Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The wrong perspective is when the business owner describes the products or services that they offer, often in too much detail. They do not write for emotional selling, or what pain points are eliminated for their clients.
Research rarely takes place at this early stage. It is not understood, valued, or within the startup budget. Unfortunately, this is a short sighted and misguided strategy. We have had several experiences recently that confirm this. Here is an example: A Functional Medicine Doctor focused on Women’s reproductive health, used the term “Preconception” throughout her site. It was a common term for her and did accurately describe the work she was doing. However, the team did the research, there was not a single search for “Preconception”. And that was why her site wasn’t getting found, no one was searching for it. The team found other keywords and long tail key phrases, adjusted the content and restructured the format of the pages for SEO. - One the Site is complete, most businesses don’t actively review it or even pay attention.
If this sounds like your situation, your business has changed, or your website isn’t generating activity, it is time to consider a site rebuild.
What We’ve Learned & How Our Web Design Process Has Evolved
Great Things LLC has always built good, attractive and cost affective websites for small businesses. Yet, we relied on the client to provide the content and did not have the services in place to offer any more. Today, we can offer SEO research and copywriting to our clients.
The Current Process: New Web Site Development and Existing Site Rebuilds
1) Kick Off Meeting: The full team meets, reviews all the requirements, investigate alternatives, establish a preliminary budget and project timeline.
2) Sketch out a wireframe or site structure diagram. List the pages, menus, sections, widgets, plugins, forms, integrations, etc. After approval move to the SEO Site Strategy
2) Create A SEO SITE STRATEGY document. This document describes the content, key words and phrases, site cross linking and other critical SEO and structural assumptions.
3) Begin Page content development, page by page, with deeper SEO research. The content will be presented as a draft on a development site, or in a document that calls out the appropriate tags (Header Tags, Block Quotes, widget sections, etc).
4) Web Site Development, based on the Wireframe, SEO Site Strategy & page content research.
5) At Go Live, add in the meta data, snippets, key words & phases, setting featured images, implement google analytics and other tools.
Our Most Recent Website Rebuild
AnxietyTraining.com has been a long term and great client. They offer online training and CEUs for mental health professional. Their courses were sold and hosted by Thinkific.com, a popular and affective online learning platform.
Over the years, small site updates, changes in business offers and other growth caused the site to become a little fragmented. The sales flow from the website and out to Thinkific was clunky. More importantly, the SEO value of the course descriptions and content was lost to Thinkific and not their website.
Fortunately, we had been doing the SEO research and content optimization on the sales copy for most of the courses. We brought back the sales/landing pages into the website, instead of passing visitors over to Thinkific. With the sales landing pages located on the website, Anxiety Training picked up all of the SEO relevance and we only passed the visitors out to the check out of Thinkific. Thinkific handles that very well.
Having the sales and landing pages on the website also allowed us to streamline the customer’s buying process. Having the courses and the types of organizations and professional identified, cross selling and converting sales funnels becomes more realistic.
Check out Anxiety Training’s “Courses and Classes” page. You will see the clear description of the course, properly formatted and structured content, and a uniform visual presentation. This was just released live and we will be following the success and sales increase attributable to the new site design.
Are You Ready to Update Your Website?
Schedule a call to discuss your specific situation and needs. We can have these projects complete in as little as 4 weeks. Let’s see what makes sense for your online marketing evolution.
