A Redesign Focused on SEO
It is not very uncommon to be asked to redesign a website for SEO reasons. Sometimes the hierarchy of the website isn’t that great, the website isn’t very fast because it has too many images, it needs more text on the homepage to explain what the product or service is, or it simply needs a new look because the bounce rate is too high. These types of projects can be fun and it is easy to measure ROI, which means the client knows what they are paying for and has a desire to grow into a quality, professional relationship. Country Divine is one of those clients and I would like to share their project.
I don’t usually show before and after images because I don’t want to show my work against someone else’s. Often times it is not a fair comparison because the design style and what is popular changes every year or two. Instead, lets look at the focal point. Here on a product page you can see a quality amount of text and a nice clean layout.
All products are clearly laid out with a distinct call to action to purchase the product.
Quality Content for SEO
One of the most important parts of SEO is content. If you don’t have quality content, Google can’t find you relevant. Content also drives visitors, which reaffirms your website’s relevancy. For this reason, a blog is generally a good idea. Since WordPress is known as the blogging platform, I like to keep your blog in WordPress. You might be thinking, “oh that stinks…two logins” but for your ease and ease of your wallet, we’ll just integrate the WordPress blog into Magento, allowing the primary design to carry over and give you a single sign on from Magento that connects directly to the blog.
Micro tags for Magento SEO
Adding micro data is another trick to help the search engine know more about your products. When you think of a typical catalog page, showing a category’s products, you think you three or four images in a row with a title and a price underneath the picture. Because there isn’t much information here, the search engine doesn’t really know all about your products. We resort to Schema.org, a list of micro data collected and approved across HTML standards to determine these tags.
What is Schema.org?
Directly from the website: “This site provides a collection of schemas that webmasters can use to markup HTML pages in ways recognized by major search providers, and that can also be used for structured data interoperability (e.g. in JSON). Search engines including Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right Web pages.”
The website gives an example: “Usually, HTML tags tell the browser how to display the information included in the tag. For example, <h1>Avatar</h1> tells the browser to display the text string ‘Avatar’ in a ‘heading 1’ format. However, the HTML tag doesn’t give any information about what that text string means — and this can make it more difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content to a user.”
Conclusion
In conclusion, doing a redesign that keeps the website very simple but increases the quality content that is presented is an affordable way to boost your SEO and conversion rate.
Your ROI can be tracked in many ways but I prefer Google e-E-Commerce Analytics. The tools makes it easy to track where users are coming from, what they purchased and to set goals for marketing.
With a redesign (or Magento Migration) that’s focused on SEO you can make small changes to your website that and continue to add and amend pieces as you measure the results. It could be lucrative to get a clean, simple website in place with quality content and then track changes than to spend a lot of money on an expensive rebuild when you already have sales and some organic traffic.
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