The way people react to and digest information they find online is now a factor in how a website is received by an audience and ranks according to their preferences. Websites that remain constantly relevant to its target audience rank well, and those that don’t are pushed down in search result pages. Older websites are then challenged to reinvent themselves and discover new ways they can adapt to trends to come back on top. A great way to adapt to new online marketing trends is by relaunching your old website with new features that appeal to your target audience.
Here, we’ll learn about a few useful tips to keep in mind when preparing for a website relaunch, as well as what we can continuously do to make a new and improved website a success in the market.
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Pre-launch Audit
While some website managers opt to wait for real-time information about how well their relaunched websites are performing, it helps to conduct an audit on your website in its testing stage. This aims to catch and correct errors on the new website before it goes live.
A pre-launch audit allows owners to compare the changes made between their old and new site and ensure that the point for the relaunch is satisfied. This also helps owners see the difference in their past and current online marketing efforts, tracking their growth and recognizing the potential a relaunched website has in attracting visitors and converting these visits to profit.
A typical pre-launch audit looks at five different factors: current analytics, technical issues, site content, internal links and benchmarking against high-traffic keywords.
- Integrating Analytics
Since a website relaunch is not the same as building a completely new website from scratch, it’s important to make sure that your site’s analytics continue to show data from the old site and its relaunched version. To make the best decisions based on your site’s performance and track the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts, you need to be looking at data that integrates both versions of your website. This allows you to determine whether your relaunch efforts succeed in bringing new traffic to your business. Failing to integrate data from your old site will result in a skewed measurement of performance and may cause you to make misinformed decisions regarding your online marketing efforts and targets.
- Catching Technical Issues
As with anything that’s new and may be untested by a large audience, a relaunched website can also be susceptible to technical issues.
Business owners or their web design firms should catch potential errors before the new site goes live. Watch for factors such as the time it takes a relaunched page to load successfully, the functionality of newly integrated commands and the appearance of its new layout and ability to display newly added elements such as design and images.
Needless to say, a relaunched website that proves to be far from fully functional defeats its own purpose and negatively impacts a business’ online marketing efforts. If your relaunched website experiences technical issues, it’s more likely to drive site visitors away, instead of being able to use your new site as an effective marketing tool for conversion.
Whether as the owner you opt to redesign the website yourself, or you choose to work with a web design firm, it’s important to turn your test site inside out and repeatedly test for any of these technical components to make sure your online marketing efforts truly succeed with a relaunched website.
- Checking the Market
The goal of re-launching a website is to improve online marketing efforts and generate more leads and sales. To successfully determine an online marketing strategy, it helps to check how your market moves and what appeals to your audience.
You can check for trends by looking at high-volume keywords and top sites that are able to effectively direct search engine users to their business. You can also check how your old site ranks for these high-traffic keywords and track your improvement with a relaunched website in the long run.
- Reviewing Your Content
Perhaps the single most important reason that drives business owners to relaunch their website- content – which makes every site what it is. Content determines how websites are found and how a business’ online presence ultimately leads to the success of its online marketing efforts.
Business owners with poorly updated websites are driven to relaunch their websites, repackage their content and introduce their business to potential clients through a fresh version of their site.
When updating your site’s content, it’s important to review what was already published before and create continuity by organizing upcoming content according to what your business’ market is abuzz with. Updated, relevant and trending content guarantees the success of your online marketing efforts, as it helps potential clients find you better and assures them of your standing in the market.
Successfully keeping content fresh requires reviewing your SEO efforts and making sure that your site has content for what it’s supposed to be found by search engines for. This means updating your list of keywords and making sure that your site’s articles, images, descriptions and titles reflect the keywords you want to be found and bring in business for.
- Building Links
As with encountering technical issues on your site’s elements, internal links are also susceptible to issues in relaunched websites. When sites are redesigned and their code is updated, some links may be broken in the process, failing to redirect from one page to another. A website is as strong as its internal links, much like building blocks.
Each section of your website should be connected to form a whole to make sure that all parts of it are found on search engines, especially that searches these days are becoming more specific to better match users with exactly what they need. It’s important to test your redesigned site’s links, making sure that its pages are connected to effectively market your business online as a whole. An example is checking for links between blog articles and product or service pages, and these product pages to contact forms for closing deals. The more links your site has, the more likely potential clients find everything you offer and encourage them to do business with you.
Maintaining Your Efforts
The real test of your online marketing strategy and efforts begins when your website is relaunched. From this point forward, you will need to continuously audit your site, update content and track your rank and performance against high-traffic keywords and see how much your business is improving. You will also want to track how well your relaunched site converts leads generated online to actual sales you make. Maintaining a functional, high-traffic website is a constant challenge and it will always take innovation to stay on top of the game.