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 that 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 and in-depth audit of your website and catalogue all your key assets to ensure that you protect it. 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 keep visitors coming back and add value to your website’s overall performance.
- Protect those inbound links that 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 making sure you preserve 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 making sure that they are forwarded to your new website to avoid error messages and broken links. In addition broken links, can hurt your search engines 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 is to 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 you 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 simply type in keyword tools in Google and it should return a list of different options for you to consider.
Nicole McCullum is the Founder of Captivate Designs a website redesign company that specializes in website redesign Chicago that helps Chicago, Illinois businesses 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 on web redesign IL you may reach contact her for a free consultation at 877-877-4935