Kulture Konnect Blog

Your website looks great. The design flows seamlessly, all of the visual elements seem to be working together perfectly, and the appearance reflects your company’s desired brand image exactly the way you want.

But website visitors aren’t coming.

No matter how fantastic a new website redesign looks, it’s hardly effective if potential customers aren’t visiting your site and interacting with your company’s content. And that’s where SEO strategy comes in.

A well-developed SEO strategy can boost your website traffic, leads, and sales, helping launch your businesses towards success.

But how does it all work and why is it so important?

What is SEO Strategy:

An SEO strategy is composed of a lot of different things, but the main idea of SEO is to structure your website in ways that improve ranking on search engines.  SEO can generally be broken down into two categories–on-site SEO and off-site SEO. While on-site SEO deals with SEO components on the site itself, such as title tags, meta descriptions, content writing, and site structure, among others, off-site SEO includes all of the external factors that impacts site ranking, such as link building, local SEO, and social media mentions, among others. A solid SEO strategy that combines a variety of these on-site and off-site factors is a marketing investment that pays off by increasing your website’s exposure and bringing in new web visitors to your site.

Why is it Important?

Not considering SEO in your website’s marketing strategies is highly damaging—it can result in a loss of traffic and reduced sales. But doing SEO the right way can optimize your site for both search engines and target audience alike, increasing sales, traffic, and revenue. 

That’s why, when it comes to lead generation and attracting prospects, having a SEO strategy in place can be one of the most important aspects of a website redesign. 

The Ultimate SEO Website Redesign Checklist:

While making an SEO strategy might seem easy—after all, it’s only words, right—there’s a lot more research and effort that goes into perfecting the most useful SEO strategy than that. Which is why we’ve created this ultimate SEO checklist for your company’s website redesign.

1. Website inventory and audit: Start by conducting an inventory of your content. Catalog all of the content on your website, then start the content audit process by evaluating all of the material you’ve cataloged. 
2. Establish new sitemap: To create a new sitemap that’s able to get indexed faster by search engines, review the flow of your website’s pages, starting from the homepage. It’s best to have a shallow depth in your sitemap, meaning that it’s easy to click and navigate your way to any page on your website. Then, code your URLs, validate the code, and submit your sitemap to different search engine platforms. 
3. Get SEO built-in to your redesign: There are countless SEO tools available to help infuse good SEO practices into your website redesign, such as Ahrefs, SEMRush, and KWFinder, among others. Try using one—or a few—to help automate your SEO strategy. 
4. Page speed optimization: Page speed measures how long it takes all of the content on your webpage to load—hint, faster is better. So, if your page speed isn’t hitting the mark, try to compress images, cache web pages, and reduce redirects to boost your speed.
5. Navigation: Website navigation is an essential element of SEO. In order to make it easier for search engine crawlers to access your site, your website navigation should be seamless and intuitive. 
6. Internal linking: Search engines highly value links leading from one page on your website to another. Internal linking can also improve navigation and keep customers browsing your content. 
7. Breadcrumb navigation: Breadcrumb navigation can help visitors jump back and forth between pages easily, boosting browsing and reducing bounce. Set up your breadcrumb navigation in a manner that’s intuitive to your industry and target audience. 
8. Set Up 301 Redirects: Rather than outright delete obsolete pages, setting up 301 redirects helps ensure that visitors wandering to those old pages get properly redirected to the updated website with relevant information, ensuring you don’t lose out on leads and revenue. 
9. Verify Robots Information and Submit XML Sitemap: Locate your sitemap URL, find the robots.txt file, and add your sitemap location to the robots.txt file so that search engines can easily discover your website’s pages. 
10. Set Up Search Console: The Google Search Console provides analytic tools and reports that offer valuable data, such as your site’s search traffic and online performance. It can also help identify issues and improve your ranking, so registering a Search Console is essential during a website redesign. 
11. Monitor SEO Performance Changes: Stay up to date on how effective your current SEO strategies are, and be prepared to make changes if necessary. The things that search engines value often change over time, but sometimes only a small readjustment is needed to remain relevant on search engines.

Conclusion: 

In order to optimize your website for search engines and draw in more visitors and leads, building an SEO strategy is a must. By carefully following these crucial tips during your website’s redesign, your company will be better set up for success.

If there’s anything that SEO strategy has shown, it’s that using the right words can make all the difference on your website’s performance. That’s why next Thursday we’ll be taking an in-depth look at the importance of a call-to-action (or CTA) in your website redesign!