So, you have reached the point where you are embarrassed to hand out your business cards at networking events because your website is listed on it, and you don’t want your colleagues and potential clients to visit your website and form a bad opinion about you and your business. The next step is redesigning your website so that you can have something that you can be proud of, which is a professional representation of you and your business and what you stand for.
Hold the brakes, before you overhaul your website, there is a very important step that you must take first, before you say hasta la vista to your old website.
Perform an in-depth audit of your website and catalog all your key assets to ensure that you protect them. Failure to protect your website assets could make your website redesign as much a failure as if you maintain a poorly designed website.
Such website assets to look into are as follows.
- Protect content that keeps visitors coming back and adds value to your website’s overall performance.
- Protect those inbound links you have worked so hard to obtain and invested a lot of time or money to develop.
- Most importantly, make sure that you do not lose your existing keyword rankings by preserving the content, meta tags, and page URL on keywords that you are ranked high for.
- If you are going to create new page URLs, protect those old URLs by ensuring they are forwarded to your new website to avoid error messages and broken links. In addition, broken links can hurt your search engine rankings and future search engine initiatives, and they also portray a bad image.
To access all the links on your website that are currently indexed, type in your website in Google in this format links: yourwebsiteaddress.com
If you have not been tracking your website performance and you do not know what your most valuable content is, it would be wise to install Google Analytics and track it for at least a thirty-day period.
To find out all the keywords that you are currently ranked for, you can perform a keyword ranking report using keyword tools such as seodigger.com and keywordspy.com or any other proprietary keyword tool. To find one that suits your needs, type in keyword tools in Google, which should return a list of different options for you to consider.
Nicole McCullum is the Founder of Captivate Designs website redesign company which specializes in website redesign Chicago that helps businesses in Chicago and Illinois transform their website presence into a powerful sales and marketing tool that generates more leads and sales for their business. If you are looking for information, web redesign IL you may reach contact her for a free consultation at 877-877-4935