Site Redesign: The Best Time for SEO Strategy

By Rich Devine | 1 Comments | Posted in in Development , Search , User Experience | Permalink

Because Search Engine Optimization is generally considered a demand generation or marketing activity, firms and marketing professionals usually consider the timing of a formal SEO strategy the same way they would for other demand-gen acitivites like email, paid search, display advertising, etc.

For example, if your site is undergoing an extensive design or redesign effort, it just doesn't make any sense to roll out a grandiose paid search strategy until after your site has been launched. You need to allow for some seasoning to the site so you can evaluate relevant, post-launch analytics. You'll want to identify what landing pages are now appropriate for paid search campaigns. Perhaps there are new content and keyword considerations that need to be incorporated.

However, the timing for SEO is entirely different. There is no better time to plan and execute an SEO strategy than during and in concert with a redesign effort. In fact, not being consious of SEO considerations during a redesign can cause significant damage to what ever SEO position you had achieved from your former site.

There is also a huge cost efficiency. Much of the recommendations that come from a formal SEO project are design and architectural in nature anyway; but the cost associated with executing those recommendations is often to great, or the ability to drive such change and recommendations is limited. During a redesign, those activities are happening anyway -- so it is crucial that SEO strategy inform redesign efforts.

USER EXPERIENCE & SEO

At ZAAZ our User Experience (U/X) Team pratices and advocates User-Centered Design. This approach involves understanding your goals as a business and the purpose of your digital and site strategy. This informs a conscious identification of who your audiences and users really are. Then, you seek to understand those users through user research, usability studies, analytics data, industry benchmarking data, and survey data. Based on a solid understanding of who your users are, you can design a user-centered site that achieves business and site goals. You're able to appropriately organize content, apply taxonomy, create navigation, build wireframes, and inform any kind of interactive or application based experiences that are appropriate for your users.

But, all too often, the practice of User-Centered Design forgets one singularly important type of user: those silent robots from Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

Understand that in essence, all these robots or crawlers try to do is pass some kind of judgement as to how usable or user-centered your site really is. This affects your position in search engine rankings. The challenge is that search engine bots are obviously not nearly as smart as humans. What may be a highly effective user experience for humans may be deemed in-effective by bots or even ignored altogether.

The other consideration is keyword relevancy. Information architecture, or how content is organzied on a site is usally performed based on what is most appropriate and effective for the user, as it should be. But it is critical that attention also be given to which keywords are used and how they are positioned within that information architecture. Using and placing the right keywords in the right position during the initial stages of information architecture and during latters stages when actual content is positioned -- provides significant SEO results.

Keyword-content efforts are most successful when U/X and SEO teams collaborate at the right time. Before the teams convene, make sure the following tasks are complete:

1. Your U/X team must perform the initial sorting and content organization activities that inform general information architecture, navigation, sitemapping, etc.

2. Your SEO team must conduct throrough keyword research, prioritization, and categorization. They need to discover all potentially relevant terms, categorize those terms into appropriate groupings, and then prioritize those terms based on potential traffic volume, rank difficulty, and value.

SEO and U/X teams then convene to share learnings and inform how high-value keyword targets can be inserted. This affects navigation, naming conventions, file structure, etc. Both teams will be surprised at what they thought was logical from their perspective versus what will drive performance both from a user perspective and a search engine perspective.

Todd Friesen shares a classic example of this in describing some of Nike's site efforts. As part of their brand proposition and messaging strategy, Nike prefers to use the term "footwear" to describe their product and experience. They feel it is more representative of what Nike offers than the limited term "shoe". But both common sense and some basic keyword research will indicate that terms involving "shoe" drive far more search volume than "footwear".

Again, a balance has to be struck between U/X and SEO -- SEO doesn't always have to win, but at the very least, the decision should be informed based on the impact and opportunity cost related to SEO.