How to Plan a Website for SEO Success

Planning a new website involves careful consideration of SEO to ensure you maintain and improve your search rankings. This guide will show you how to structure your website project for SEO success, avoiding common mistakes that can hurt your site’s visibility and traffic.

Many redesigned websites fail to improve their SEO and often lose existing rankings. This can severely impact a business’s visibility, lead generation, and sales.

Too often, businesses redesign their websites without thinking about SEO, only to realize later that the site has lost valuable traffic, requiring significant time and effort to recover. This guide will help you avoid that by walking you through the key steps to plan your site with SEO in mind from the beginning.

The Importance of Planning for SEO in Website Projects

Website redesigns can have a significant impact on SEO, both positively and negatively. A well-planned redesign can lead to improved traffic and rankings, offering a promising outlook for your business. However, a poorly planned one can undo years of hard-earned SEO progress, underscoring the importance of strategic planning.

In some cases, we’ve seen businesses spend large sums on a website only to discover that the redesign significantly harmed their SEO, forcing them to spend even more on paid ads and additional SEO work to make up for the lost organic traffic.

The goal of this guide is to help you avoid these issues by outlining a clear process for planning a website that retains existing traffic and sets the stage for future SEO improvements.

The 5 Steps to Plan an SEO-Friendly Website

1. Assess Your Current Rankings and Traffic

Before you begin, it’s important to understand how your current site is performing in terms of traffic and search rankings. Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to gather this data.

Identify the following:

• High-ranking keywords
• High-traffic keywords
• High-performing content
• Pages with high traffic potential
• Keywords with high opportunity (high impressions but low clicks)

This information is crucial for planning the new site. You need to make sure that high-traffic content and important keywords are carried over and optimized on the new site. If these are lost or not properly integrated, you risk damaging your SEO success.

Use Google Search Console:

• Navigate to Performance > Search Results
• Look at the queries and pages tabs. Sort by clicks (traffic) and impressions (opportunity) to see which pages and keywords are driving traffic.

Document these findings so you have a clear understanding of what needs to be prioritized in the new site.

Crawl Your Website:

Use a tool like Screaming Frog to crawl your existing website. Save the crawl data as it will help you later when comparing the old site to the new one to ensure important content and links aren’t lost.

2. Set Clear SEO and Website Goals

Having clear, defined goals is essential for any website project. These goals will guide your decisions throughout the process and help ensure that the new site aligns with both your business objectives and SEO strategy.

Your goals should be specific and measurable. For example:

• Website Goal: Increase leads or sales through the website.
• SEO Goal 1: Improve the ranking of key service pages.
• SEO Goal 2: Increase the visibility of top-of-funnel content to attract more traffic.

It’s also useful to set anti-goals—things you want to avoid, such as creating a site that looks too similar to competitors. These will help keep your project on track, and your team focused on the end goal.

Make sure to document your goals and refer back to them regularly as the project progresses.

3. Understand Your Audience and Customer Segments

A successful website redesign must take into account the needs and behaviors of your target audience. Defining your audience segments will help you structure your website in a way that meets their needs and improves the user experience, which in turn boosts SEO.

Start by identifying the main audience segments you want to target. Consider factors like:

• Demographics (age, gender, location)
• The specific problems or goals of each audience
• Where they spend their time online

Once you have this information, you can structure your website to serve each audience effectively. Tailoring your content and design to your target users will improve user engagement and make your site more SEO-friendly.

You can also use tools like the SEO Value Proposition Template to understand your customers better and ensure you’re creating content that aligns with their needs. Google prioritizes helpful, user-first content, so this step is critical for your SEO success.

4. Create a Content Strategy

Content is one of the most important factors in SEO, so it’s essential to have a clear content strategy in place when planning your new site. Your content strategy should focus on retaining and improving the content that’s already performing well, while also identifying new content opportunities.

Some key steps include:

• Audit Existing Content: Identify high-performing content that needs to be retained or updated in the new site.
• Identify Content Gaps: Look for areas where you could create new content to address audience needs or capture additional traffic.
• Plan for SEO: Ensure that each piece of content is optimized with the right keywords and structured for search engines.

By having a strong content strategy, you can make sure that your new site provides valuable, relevant information to users while also performing well in search engines.

5. Monitor and Measure SEO Success / Performance

Once the new site is live, it’s important to monitor its SEO performance closely. Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track your traffic, rankings, and overall SEO health. This proactive approach will help you identify any issues early on and make adjustments to improve performance over time, giving you a sense of control over your site’s success.

Key metrics to track include:

• Organic traffic
• Keyword rankings
• User engagement metrics (bounce rate, time on page)
• Conversion rates

Regularly reviewing these metrics will help you identify any issues early on and make adjustments to improve performance over time.

Key Takeaways

Planning a website with SEO in mind from the start is essential to avoid costly mistakes and maximize your site’s potential. By following these five steps, you’ll ensure that your new site not only retains existing traffic but is also set up for long-term SEO success.

A well-structured, SEO-friendly website can improve visibility, drive more traffic, and generate more leads, making it a valuable asset for your business.