Comprehensive Guide To Build A Successful Website Redesign Strategy

1. For the first month, your existing performance metrics should be your benchmark

Carefully note each and every metric that is important to you. Sit with your analytics guy and make sure to take into account your current performance. To make it more interesting, capture both information - current as well as highest, as per this you will have two milestones to catch. Following are the few important parameters you should definitely consider noting:

• Audience (note these data as a collective data along with page-wise data)
  • Number of users, unique users and new users 
  • Bounce Rate
  • Revenue (if enabled)
• Acquisition
  • Organic Search, Direct, Referral Traffic and Other (this data will tell you how things have changed once your new website is launched)
• Behavior (note these data as a collective data along with page-wise data)
  • Unique Pageviews
  • Average Time on Page
  • Exit Rate
  • Average Page Load Time
• Conversions
  • Goal Completions
  • Goal Value (if set by you previously)
  • Goal Conversion Rate
  • Goal Completion Locations

Along with all this information, if you use any tools like lucky orange or hotjar conversion rate optimization, do note their findings as well. If you think you need help with any other tool, let us know in the comments section and we will respond to you soon.

2. Identify all those pages that are producing results for you and plan a way to protect their rankings

There are a few but very important landing pages or website pages that might be producing consistent results for you.

• First of all, save all the SEO related information of all these pages
• Identify the amount of traffic they are drawing
• No. of inbound links
• Lastly, the maximum no. of leads converted from these pages individually

You have to make small but incremental changes to these pages as per your new web redesign strategy for business. In no way you can just update them as per your strategy. Trust me, I have seen businesses making such mistakes and in no manner it worked out for them.

3. Now, make the rules that include branding voice, colors, font size, positioning and messaging

This is a time consuming step. You have to analyze your current branding and identify what changes, modifications and refinements your website requires. Golden Rule - Your website messaging should resonate what you do and how you do it. Now create a brand style guide or what we call it a Brand Rulebook that should include:

• Tone of Voice - Builds a connection and trust with your audience. Decide between formal vs casual, funny vs serious, enthusiastic vs matter-of-fact.
• Brand colors - They help in identifying your brand’s personality traits (feminine or masculine or neutral, playful or serious, modern or classic, loud or subdued)
• Font size - Helps in deciding your bold or subtle you want to be when expressing with your content. It is crucial for brands that are in advertising, marketing or fashion as they have to be bold and expressive.
• Brand positioning, messaging and Brand image - Developing a strong brand message is important to keep your customers intact. But for long term results first focus to build a strong brand positioning before coming onto brand messaging. 

4. Identify what website redesign goals are you running after while linking them to your buyer personas

There is a reason why I want you to combine your buyer persona thoughts with the website redesign goals. And, the reason is simple - because buyer personas should be sitting at the core of your website redesigning strategy. 

Personas traits like behavior, touch-points, characteristics, and many other parameters will help you make informed decisions. You will be able to decide how your website navigation should be and how should a user take their respective journeys on your website. If your earlier website missed the buyer persona mapping, make sure this one should not.

? Now, while drafting your website redesign goals, ask the following questions to yourself and note them in an excel sheet. 

• What are your most result-driven pages and how can you save them? - Goal 1
• Who are your existing visitors and how can you map them to your buyer personas? - Goal 2
• Which buyer personas are not being catered currently? - Goal 3
• Which team is also responsible for generating leads from your website and how will they be catered during and after the redesign? - Goal 4
• How will you be able to measure the success of your website redesign? - Goal 5

Basic Format of your Website Redesign Goal Sheet: 

5. Examine what is working for your competition and identify what new are you willing to incorporate into your website

Okay, now this is really serious because the better you analyze, the more amazing your results can be. You have to examine what are those features, landing pages and resources (blogs, ebooks, case studies and whitepapers) that are producing outstanding results for their website. 

I suggest you to use tools like Ubersuggest, Ashref or even Semrush to prepare your competitive analysis. Make sure to follow these steps (I know this is too much, but your entire results depend on these small little things):

• Identify your competition at the very core and as per your different products/services.
• Truly inspect their website pages, features, customer experience, CTAs, visuals and graphics, social media presence, influencers, affiliate pages, mobile optimization techniques, email automation, live chat offering, and FAQs.
• What is their market positioning strategy like and are they offering any particular feature or benefit to the target audience that makes them stand out?
• If online pricing is a key thing in your business, then make sure to note, compare and act on it.
• Take a look at their online reviews online and social media reviews.
• And sign up for their newsletter to be updated on how they are interacting with their visitors.

6. Finally each of these steps have to be linked to conversion rate optimization

This step is critical, not only because it is completely dependent on all the 5 steps above but because it will help you determine if your plan is in sync with your conversion goals. 

Following questions (basically their answers) will help you to ensure that your website redesign and conversion rate optimization strategies are in sync with one another:

• Is your brand messaging compelling enough to convert?
• Is your user experience seamless when a visitor is moving from one device to another?
• Is your content tone, content visibility, and content delivery consistent and dynamic?
• Are your Calls-to-Action properly feeding the user journey at different touch-points?
• How aggressive is your testing and feeding those testing results back into the practice?

These were the 6 steps to creating a website redesign strategy template for your business. You can do it by self or better take help from affordable website redesign services around.