One of the biggest website redesign projects I have undertaken involved a website which had approximately 1.2m users a month and 90% of the traffic was organic. The website did not sell products, but rather created valuable content for a specific niche. Its profits came mainly from selling ads and promoting businesses.

I was initially asked to help with some advanced Google Analytics tasks but after talking to the client and giving them a few pointers, they saw the value of digital marketing research. The client had been trying for one year to redesign his website, but the attempts had not been very successful. I believe the reason for that was that he did not have clear defined goals and as it was, he had no idea what area to focus his efforts on or what steps to take.

This project helped me understand certain processes that are necessary when we are redesigning a website. Based on my experience, I have listed 10 steps that need to be taken to a redesign a website in a way that adheres to SEO principles. These steps should be done in order:

• not to loose any valuable organic traffic
• enhance organic traffic in the future
• be in line with the goals the business wants to achieve

Website redesign based on SEO – Recommended steps

STEP 1: Goals need to be clarified

When redesigning a website, the first thing that needs to be done is to understand what the client wants to achieve. Is it about better user experience, increasing time/sessions or pages/sessions, increasing revenue, increasing various other conversions, improving the UI, adding some new content topics etc.? This is a very important step that will help us make appropriate decisions in the next stages.

STEP2: Understand the factors that bring conversions

By this I mean that it is important to understand how the customer gets value from the website. When the website redesign involves an ecommerce website, the factors that get us conversions are more obvious. But in a website like my client’s, there were many things that could affect conversions and these needed to be specified. It is important to understand what the client’s plans for the future are. Is the client planning to change strategies or do they want to optimize the ones used so far?

Note: STEP 1 and STEP 2 require a lot of communication with the client. Communication is absolutely crucial at this stage, as it will lead to both sides being in line and working together to achieve the desired target.

STEP 3: Study the Google Analytics stats and Search Console stats

This step is very important to understand what brings traffic to the website. The Google Analytics account is well-set-up and you will also be able to understand which sources and mediums are the most profitable, which are the important landing pages, which keywords and topics bring organic traffic to the website. It will also help you understand the profile and behavior of the website’s users etc. When it comes to websites that have a lot of organic traffic, we need to be very careful when redesigning the website, because if we only think in terms of aesthetics and UX, we will most probably ‘kill’ the organic traffic and create a big problem for the client. It is extremely important to study all the info that can be found in Google Analytics and the Search Console.

STEP 4: Do an SEO marketing research

This step will give us many ideas about how the website needs to be redesigned in terms of content to match what its target audience is looking for. It is absolutely a must as we need to understand the user behavior and the user intent. Depending on the topic/s and the type and size of the website, this step might require a minimum of 2-3 days and in some cases even a couple of months of research. The broader and more varied the topics in a website, the more time it will require, but it will still be faster and better than having a team of people working on a website redesign project, following a wrong path. This step will assist us in forming a strategy, that will be based on actual data and not only beliefs and intuition.

STEP 5: Check the competition

This is the last step before we attempt to do any wire frames. It is important to understand what the competition is doing, what brings traffic to their websites, which action calls they use, what type of conversions they have, what is their design style, how they interact with their users, if their traffic is generated through organic results. Researching their most important keywords will also give us new content ideas – something which we can take into consideration in our redesign process.

STEP 6: Content Elements Research

This has been my approach to redesign. There is one more step before we make a mock-up and it is based on the fact that every page is a mixture of content elements. An example of a usual page main content elements:

• Header
• Menu
• Footer
• Main page content
• Sidebar

These are typical areas inside a website page, which might include additional content elements inside them (example, photo call of action, video, article listings, tab submenus, banners, search forms etc..). It is important to research the trends that exist in the client’s industry (competition search step) but also in the web in general (by researching and analyzing the content elements of the most popular websites in the world). The result of this research will help us follow the trends and it will give us ideas for our client’s website content and how to approach satisfying our users.

STEP 7: Mock-up Creations & Designs

After doing all this research comes the time to design mock-ups for the client’s different page layouts. At his step, SEO professionals will need to cooperate with UX and UI professionals (if the project is very big). The number of the different page layouts becomes obvious when we reach this stage. I like to think of every mock-up as the combination of different content elements – just like a puzzle. Discuss every one of these mock-ups with the client before asking the front-end designer to take over. It is important to communicate with the client through all the steps of the redesign process, get his feedback and approval and proceed with a common plan.

Ask the graphic designer to make a design for your mock-up (and start by getting him/her to design the main page of the website). Even better if the designer is also a front-end developer. But don’t just give the mock-up to the designer and stop there. It is important to communicate the goals of the project. Give the designer info about:

• The business and what the goals of the redesign are
• The profile of the users
• The current website
• Some competitor website examples (that you find interesting)
• Perhaps some other websites that are close to the design you would like to reach

And be in contact with him/her to answer any questions that might exist.

STEP 8: Focus on the Landing pages

While the designer is working on the main page design, it will be important for you to focus on the landing pages that bring the organic traffic. You will have to optimize them based on the conversions you want to achieve. The more professional the CMS or Framework your client is using, the more easy it will be to create unique experiences per landing page topic. Every landing page, or should I say groups of landing pages with similar content, will require their own attention and action calls as they will probably lead to different types of conversions. Different types of conversions require a different approach, so it is important to know your goals.

STEP 9: Finalize the design of each mock-up

When the designer has the first design for the main page ready, it is time to go back to the client and discuss it. Get feedback from the client and make the requested changes. Normally, if you follow all the previous steps, it will not be difficult to finalize the design, as the final design will not be something very different from what you had communicated and discussed with the client in all the previous steps.

STEP 10: Start implementing the design

This is not a single step, but will actually require a sequence of steps, which will depend on how the front-end and back-end teams are formed and operate. If the project is big, a manager is absolutely necessary to ensure that everyone understands what has to be done and which is his/her part in the project. And of course, the manager needs to ensure that the project deadlines are met without exceeding the forecasted budget.

Some additional comments about the Website redesign services and steps

The steps mentioned above are recommended for website redesign projects that aim to improve the aesthetics of a website and want to make sure that no organic traffic will be lost. These steps can also help us improve the organic traffic of a website after the redesign, but they are not enough if a website has technical SEO problems, or it initially targeted the wrong topics etc. In projects where step 4 (SEO marketing research) uncovers such issues, more steps need to be taken to ensure the correct transition from the old website to the new one. This is because in these cases the structure of the new website will most probably be very different and it will require more work from an SEO point of view and from the developers.

Do you need website redesign services based on SEO?

If you need professional website redesign services based on SEO, please follow the link in the button below to request a quote. I will come back to you within 2 working days.

The post HOW TO REDESIGN A WEBSITE – 10 STEPS GUIDE USING ALSO SEO appeared first on Try SEO Consultant Services.

Why? Recently, I had such an experience with one of my clients. Eighty percent (80%) of my client’s website traffic is based on organic search which is equivalent to approx. 1.1million organic sessions per month and 2.2million organic pageviews per month. My client moved successfully to the https from a technical point of view but was not aware of the other steps that had to be made to guarantee that the organic traffic and the reporting tools that he uses to monitor it (Google Analytics, Webmaster tools) would not start illustrating unexpected drops. When he reached me he asked me if I could understand what was causing the big drop. The good thing in this case was that I had already done in the past research on his website so I was able to understand faster the issue. The client did not mentioned to me that he moved to https few days before he contacted me but for me it was one of the first things to cross check. In anycase the details of this story are not important since at the end (a few days later) everything went back to normal. What is important though is what needs to be taken into consideration before a move to https. Below you will find a list with some of my SEO cross checks:

This will be the end of what is needed for the correct transition related to GA reporting.

After doing this, I would recommend crawling all the website one last time just to be sure you have double checked everything. The next days monitor the stats both in GA and Search console. Depending on the size of the website it might take several days until you see the expected stats especially in Search console. Monitor, everything (i.e. site traffic, indexed pages, errors etc.) until you are sure that the transition went smoothly.

Last but not list, check if you notice any unexpected changes in the backlinks reports. This is the last cross check!

If you run adwords campaigns, or have indexed your site in other search engines (i.e. yandex, bing etc) you will need to make some adjustments there are well.

My personal advice would be if you are not sure about any of these steps to hire someone professional to do it for you. You need to make sure that everything related to the transition will go smoothly. Otherwise, you might face some really unpleasant situations.

Good Luck!

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A lot of small business owners who cannot afford to pay for SEO services on a monthly basis or who would like to experiment with SEO themselves are interested in finding out which is the best SEO  software for small businesses. This article will present which are the top 10 SEO software solutions for small businesses based on the findings of a research contacted in Google search. The research is analyzing the proposals of the top 10 ranking articles in google search results for the keyword ‘best seo software for small business’. As I have not yet used all of the SEO tools mentioned I will comment on the ones I know and the ones I am using or have used in the past. I will also share with you my impressions about the ones I did not know so far and how willing I am to devote some time and try them.

Additional info about the way the research was contacted

The research was cross checking the top 10 results in google.com and google.co.uk domains for the keyword ‘best seo software for small businesses’. On average in every one of these top ranking articles, 10-13 SEO tools were mentioned with some exceptions of pages that were mentioning all the SEO ones they knew and were ranking them. In these cases I only took into consideration the top 10-13 tools. There was one website whose proposals I had never heard before and I have excluded it from this research because I believe that it was biased. It was excluding some of the top tools in this industry… In anycase, this research by no means is a formal one comparing features in detail but it is a research based on popularity.  I have also checked which are the total number of searches per month in google search for each SEO tool brand name in order to get also an additional idea of how popular each SEO tool is based on google stats. And again this cannot be considered a formal research as I have not expand the research to include all the different variations that online users use to search for each brand but just included the top 3 name variations for each brand  (whenever this was the case).

What I am hoping to achieve with this research

As an SEO consultant who offers affordable SEO services to small businesses I am hoping that I will help some of you choose the SEO tool which will assist you understand better your organic traffic and help you monitor it and increase it. Just to note thought, if you have a startup or are in the process of building a new website or redesigning your website do contact an SEO expert. There are SEO tasks that require experience and technical knowledge and it is best not to start a project just experimenting. It is very common in such cases after a few months to realize that you need to build your website from the beginning in order to do a real SEO work on it. An SEO professional will guide you and make sure that you do not make important mistakes and at the same time will offer you guidance on what she/he thinks is best to do for your company. I would be happy to hear from you if you need small business seo consultant services.

The top 15 Best SEO Tools for small Businesses 2019

Not to keep you waiting more. Here is the list with the top 15 best SEO software tools based on my research:

* The research was contacted at the end of December 2018 and it can be used for proposing the best SEO software for 2019.

I have highlighted with bold the tools that I have never heard before. This is a very interesting research also for me as it keeps me updated with new tools for SEO! 🙂  The column ‘Top 10 articles popularity’ shows how many times each SEO tool was mentioned in my research in these top 10 article proposals. The column Google search popularity shows how many times the name of each brand is searched on a monthly basis in google search (global searches from users who type in English). The column  ‘Additional keywords included’ shows the additional keywords that I included in my research when writing down the number in the ‘Google search popularity’ column because some of these brands are known with more than one name etc. Lastly the column premium or free explains very fast if any of these tools is free to use.

To be noted that for the tools Majestic and Optimizely the Google search popularity number could be misleading as for the case of Majestic there is also a band with this name and for the word of Optimizely the searches are switching to the keyword ‘optimize’ and thus probably the number is higher than the monthly searches the specific brand name receives.

My impressions after seeing the results

I must say that I would have probably predicted 50% of the list and I am happy to see that there are tools that I did not know. Some of these tools may help me do my job better and faster in the future. On the other side there are SEO tools which I consider very good and are not listed in this list so I decided to give also my list of best SEO tools. Here is my list:

I have highlighted with bold all the tools that I am using and the ones that I believe are market leaders on their niche. But I believe it is fair at least to mention which were the other SEO tools that the articles were mentioning. I must admit that I find some of them very interesting and I will try to find some time to explore their features in the future.

The rest of the SEO tools mentioned in the top 10 ranking articles

The below table presents the rest of the SEO tools that were mentioned in these 10 articles with my comments for each one. As the purpose of this article is not to present each tool in detail or to review each SEO tool I have only included at the bottom of this article a glossary. The Glossary shows how each tool is positioned in the market with one sentence based on their website home page SEO title or SEO meta description.

How many suggestions for SEO tools this research covers?

This research presenting the findings of 99 SEO tool suggestions and in total 50 tools that were proposed for SEO analysis. Thus, it is clear that SEO is not a task that can be achieved only by using one tool. It is important to know more. But if you wish to start from somewhere I would for sure recommend all the free tools that especially Google provides and one of the General SEO tools (ahrefs, SEMrush, Serpstat or Moz). And as you progress with what you can do and can achieve with these tools to add more tools in your procedures until you reach the stage that you are happy with what you can achieve.

SEO Tools Glossary

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The reason I decided to write this article is because I believe that SEO is not positioned in the proper way. I believe that SEO in 2019 is much more or can become much more than what many definitions that have been written about it present. Not to mention and make also comparison with articles that have been written about the future of SEO and fears for this industry. Going back to the SEO definitions, I will continue by presenting some of the most popular ones. Popular defined as the ones that are ranking in the 1st page of Google search results for the keyword ‘What is SEO’. I will then continue by commenting on these popular SEO definitions and my idea of repositioning SEO. I think that at least some of you will be surprised with the way I think we need to position SEO. I think I am not ready to present the new definition but this is an article to be used as food for thought and maybe we can all together in the near future try to redefine SEO.

Popular SEO definitions

Let’s start with the definitions.
https://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/what-is-seo
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.

https://www.redevolution.com/what-is-seo
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the name given to activity that attempts to improve search engine rankings.

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/what-is-seo/
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of increasing the number and quality of visitors to a website by improving rankings in the algorithmic search engine results.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/what-is-seo/
I must admit that I liked this article which is written by Rebekah Bek very much! I really like the idea behind it. It presents the opinions of many SEO professionals about what SEO is and it groups them in terms of their main focus. According to Rebekah Bek findings, the main groupings as regards to the main focus of each definition mentioned in this article are:
SEO is about optimizing websites for search engines
SEO is about matching searchers’ needs to content
SEO as a strategy
What is my personal favorable from these three is the last one. SEO as a strategy! But I will analyze this as we move on. Here are some more definitions about what is SEO which I should mention as they also appear in Google’s 1st page results and also come from very popular websites and SEO professionals.

https://yoast.com/what-is-seo/
SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’. It’s the practice of optimizing websites to make them reach a high position in Google’s – or other search engines’ – search results. SEO focuses on rankings in the organic (non-paid) search results. In this post, I’ll answer the question “What is SEO?” and I’ll explain our approach to SEO here at Yoast.
https://neilpatel.com/what-is-seo/
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine’s unpaid results—often referred to as “natural”, “organic”, or “earned” results.
Ofcourse there are more and if you visit Rebekah’s Bek article you will see what I mean but I believe as RebeKah has done already they can be grouped in regards to their main focus. ..
Let’s make a joke here… Sorry, where is my definition of SEO??? Why is it still not appearing in the top 10 list???? Hmm okay some time Google is also wrong.. 🙂 So, please allow me to present also my definition of SEO.. I assure you I am humble SEO consultant..

My attempt to define what is SEO

And here is my latest attempt to define SEO as shown in my article for SEO for small businesses.

SEO is the practice of first understanding the online users’ behavior and intent, then adjusting the products and services to fulfill the needs of the targeted audience and adjusting the website’s content as needed to increase the quantity and quality of organic traffic to achieve better conversion rates and user satisfaction.

Looking at it again … hmm I must say I am not 100% happy. I believe it is a bit technical for someone who is not aware of this terminology and at the same time it is missing something important. And I am more unhappy with what it is missing than its technical part or my poor language skills in trying to explain my thoughts.

So what I believe is missing from the SEO definition?

I think they are missing the broader picture of what a business can achieve using SEO. Because SEO is not only a set of tools and techniques combined to help a business website increase its traffic and its conversions. This is too small as definition infront of what SEO can really do. Why? Because I believe that SEO can become and merely is already the marketing research tool of the future. And as a marketing research tool it cannot only be restricted to the borders of a website. What if a company does not have a website? You will tell me all companies have websites in our days. I will agree. All the professional companies have websites in our days…

BUT…. but what else can we state about the definition of SEO??

• What about the entrepreneurs who are getting ready to built their new businesses or their startups? What about the companies that are thinking to expand their businesses and they are not sure how to do it?
• What about companies who are thinking to create new products and they do not know if there is demand for their products?
• What about companies who want to understand who is the leader in their market but do not know from where to get the data?
• What about companies that need consultation to grow their business and they need to base their decisions on accurate data?

And many more such WHAT questions..

I believe that every SEO professional knows that our research can provide accurate data. It is possible with an SEO full marketing research to give answers, ideas, actual data to all these business needs no matter if a business has a website or not.  No matter if they want to rank high or not. SEO initially was developed for Search Engine Optimization BUT it has developed so much that it can be considered as a skill that can be used to provide business consultation based on online marketing research and help businesses grow by understanding the markets in which they operate. All business needs to understand:

– which are their competitors,

– how big their competitors are,

– which are the popular products or services in their markets

– but also the which are the products or services that are not so popular but exist

– how their target audience is thinking

In general everything that the traditional marketing research has to provide is something that can be enhanced with SEO and in some cases also be replaced. The greater the market share of the online sales & leads becomes versus the traditional physical/in store sales the more accurate and close to reality the data we can gather with our SEO tools and knowledge are becoming. And I believe we have already passed the stage were these data was a small representation of reality. But for many business decision makers they do not even need to be something more to help them make decisions. These data are already valuable indicators of the reality and can help them make decisions with less risk.

The power of AI in SEO

As an SEO professional myself I see on a daily basis how important is my SEO research for my clients. But, in order to implement all my technical SEO proposals, the navigation proposals, the content SEO proposals and even the back linking proposals I have first to convince my clients that my ideas are valuable. And how I do this? By studying there industries, their businesses with my SEO marketing research. And just like a miracle I start seeing and describing their market and their audiences in ways that they have never thought of before. I am not a magician to do this… and you are not either. It is the power of SEO techniques and the SEO tools that we use and ofcourse the creativity in thinking that help me find ways to prove to them what is needed. And the more we will enter in the artificial intelligence age the more powerful tools we will have to study our customers’ markets. Data these days are everywhere but businesses need people who can study these data and interpret them. Our job starts by first studying these data to find interesting correlations and business information. Then we translate these data to valuable business proposals which we use mainly for SEO optimizing websites. But to implement them we need to give consultation to our clients to understand why… And I believe many of us do this consultation but we still position SEO as something related to keywords and websites… It is something much more than this and I believe there is a lot of future in our industry if we reposition it!

Hope you like the article and I would like to hear your comments about it. Let’s start to reposition our industry in a way that it will solve our customers problems and hazards than just bringing traffic to their websites. Is my attempt to try to position SEO in such a way too optimistic?? What do you think?

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