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For many businesses, a website serves as the digital storefront of their organization.
Just as a company can present itself well or poorly to the public, a corporate website can be perceived positively or negatively by both users and search engines.
Year after year, developments in the field of Web Design and web search algorithms set new quality standards, sometimes even unpredictable ones, adapting to user browsing behavior. Just think of Google’s mobile-first indexing in 2018 or the evolution of CMS for creating dynamic websites.
This is the reason why a website cannot last forever.
A study conducted by Orbit Media compared 200 marketing agency websites to determine the average lifespan of their websites between redesigns. The result is about 2.66 years – a very low value in the collective imagination, but not necessarily representing the standard.
Therefore, since defining the ideal lifecycle of a website is difficult, a redesign should still be planned when issues with graphics, usability, performance, or ranking start to arise. In this regard, a website redesign from an SEO perspective takes into account all the aspects involved so that the site can be easily found by users and its navigation is smooth and intuitive.
How to Determine if an SEO Redesign is Needed
But what are the elements to consider for a website redesign “the SEO way”?
Let’s start by listing the main factors to consider for the redesign of a website from an SEO standpoint. To do this, let’s draw inspiration from one of the most disastrous (and amusing) case studies that, some time ago, could be found on the Internet, named “The World’s Worst Website Ever“.
Web Graphic Design and UI
If it’s true that a website is a company’s showcase, its online business card, then it must look good. A professional graphic layout in line with the Brand Identity is essential to make a positive impression on users accessing the site.
The User Interface aims for a minimalist and essential style where all graphic elements are designed and positioned consistently in terms of size and placement. Fonts, styles, colors, or buttons: nothing is left to chance.
A website in need of a redesign often presents some graphic issues: intrusive sliders on the homepage, elements that are too large or too small, autoplaying media, buttons that are too close or too far apart, uncoordinated colors and fonts.
What doesn’t work here? Indecipherable fonts, mismatched colors, incorrectly formatted backgrounds, intrusive buttons, etc.
Usability and User Experience
As visually pleasing as a website may be, it also needs to be navigable with ease: this is where User Experience and usability factors come into play.
Redesigning a website cannot ignore the browsing experience, which should be as intuitive, accessible, and satisfying as possible. Anyone conducting a web search wants to find and interact with what they’re looking for immediately.
There are many areas for improvement in terms of usability. Among the most common are non-responsive elements (layouts that remain static across different devices) and microtexts not optimized for UX, confusion in content organization, difficulty orienting oneself on the site, and slow page loading.
What doesn’t work here? Non-responsive layout, difficult-to-interpret structure, content confusion, etc.
Performance and Core Web Vitals
Speaking of loading performance: the importance of having a fast website is one of the main reasons why a website redesign is often necessary.
And it’s easy to understand why – if a website is visually and logically well-organized, but the loading times are long, users are unlikely to continue browsing. Google estimates that if a page takes between 1 and 3 seconds to load, there’s a 32% chance that the user will abandon it before it loads.
It’s no coincidence that performance is a ranking factor on Google today.
When redesigning a website from an SEO perspective, it’s essential to consider all the aspects that affect speed and page loading performance (which can be analyzed, for example, using Google PageSpeed or web/dev tools).
Ranking and SEO Copywriting
Lastly, let’s not forget that in the web world, “content is king”. If a website is beautiful, functional, and fast, but its content isn’t relevant and optimized for search engines, the work done previously could be in vain.
Content is what users are looking for when they conduct a web search. It’s essential to give proper attention to SEO optimization of texts, heading titles, meta tags, multimedia files, etc., in terms of positioning for relevant keywords.
Declining trends in positioned keywords, decreased organic traffic, perceived Authority instability by Google for the domain, worsening quality of backlinks – elements like these could be indicators of a site’s penalization.
What doesn’t work here? Non-existent organic traffic, declining keyword positioning, no valuable backlinks.
How to Perform an SEO Website Redesign
An SEO-focused website redesign is not a standardized procedure. After analyzing critical elements and potential improvements, redesign interventions can take various forms:
- Back-end optimizations to improve site performance;
- Front-end optimizations regarding graphic layout and UX usability;
- Site structure revision to enhance usability and SEO ranking;
- Site content revision to work on SEO positioning.
Considering that each website has its own strengths and weaknesses, if you’re considering an SEO-focused website redesign, it’s often useful to start with a comprehensive analysis that can summarize the most important aspects of your web marketing strategy.
Have you ever heard of a Digital Marketing Audit?
Let’s talk about it and find out if it’s worth considering a redesign for your website!
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