If you’re having an old website redesigned that has been around for a long time, frankly even a short time, don’t hand it over to a web designer without either asking for research to be done prior to redeployment of the new site or doing the research yourself.
There’s a list of things to find out that may be very helpful for the launch of your new site, for instance, how many pages does Google have indexed? You could do that now by opening up Google on your computer or tablet or smartphone and type in the search panel 'site:' followed by your web address, www. etc, etc. when you hit return or click search Google will return all the pages of your site to you.
Bench Mark with Google Analytics
It will be very helpful to establish a bench mark for the old site then you can see how your redesign has improved your ratings, and if your designer tells you that design itself has no bearing on results refer them to the video below from 2011 when design started to have a definite influence on results. The better the user experience, the more Google like your site!
To establish the bench mark you should look at your analytics software, if you don’t have any, install Google Analytics, it’s free and very good. It will give you an idea of the average number of visitors coming to your site, which pages they enter the site from and other helpful data.
If for instance more of your visitors come to your site via the contact page it might be handy to find out which search terms are being used to bring up that page, and if they stay a while by clicking through to another page the layout and the content should be looked at and possibly reused.
As the saying goes… if it ain’t broke don’t fix it!
The basic list to check out is;
Number of indexed pages with Google
Domain History, it’s age certainly
Domain Authority - a number between 0-100
Page Authority – a number between 0-100
Average Page Traffic – numbers of visitors per month
Low Bounce Rate – a percentage of the total visitors who ‘bounce away from your site without visiting another page
Current Google Page Rank
Number of links to the site
Number of Google pluses if any
Number of Twitter mentions (home page definitely)
Facebook Followers if a business page exists
With this information you or your re-designer can get a good picture of the how the site sits, it may highlight url’s that should be kept in use or redirected at worst and a base line to work from.
If you have any difficulty finding this info give us a call, most of it’s fairly easy as we use tools that display it all the time, it’ll be our pleasure.
