It’s Website Redesign Month here at OCC. So, earlier this week Mark shared the story of the website redesign we recently completed for Grand Vista Pools. The new website looks great! My compliments to our design team.
But as good as the website looks, the redesign would have been a total bust if one particular thing had been overlooked. And believe me, most organizations overlook this when they redesign their site. What is it?
Re-optimization
In addition to Christian website design, we also provide Grand Vista Pools with SEO services. When we first started working with them several years ago, we optimized their website, and we have continued to monitor their website, monitor their search rankings, produce optimized content, and adjust their optimization as needed to keep their search rankings improving.
Their new website has a new theme, the header and footer are different, the menu has been reorganized, and the content on some of the pages has been updated. As is usually the case, a lot of the optimization had been overwritten.
If we had just launched the new website “as is” it would have killed their search rankings and their traffic would have tanked!
The new website needed to be re-optimized before it could be launched.
In addition to the re-optimization, Grand Vista Pools asked us to do a few other things that would improve their further improve their search rankings and bring them more website visitors:
1) Re-do keyword research. One of the first things we do before optimizing any website is keyword research to determine which relevant keywords get the most searches and have a low enough competition level that the website can expect to rank well for them. Well, over time markets change, people’s search habits change, and search data changes. Therefore it’s a good idea to re-do keyword research every couple of years to make sure a site is targeting the best keywords. We re-did the keyword research first, so when we re-optimized the site it would be based on the latest research.
2) Add new optimized landing pages. Grand Vista Pools builds and renovates pools in 3 counties of the Tampa Bay area. They are a local company serving local clients, and as such most people searching for a pool builder include a city in their search. The challenge is there are more than 100 cities and unincorporated communities within their service area. So, the client asked us to start a new initiative creating city-specific landing pages. We started by adding 6 in January and will be adding more each month.
Mind-blowing results!
What effect did the redesign, re-optimization and new landing pages have?
In one month, they gained an additional 1,465 top 10 rankings bringing their total to more than 7,000! And they more than doubled their #1 rankings from 843 to 1,847!
Website visitors from search engines increased by 24% from the previous month and was up 32% over the same month last year.
To be honest, even I was amazed!
Bottom line
If you’re planning to redesign your website – if you haven’t in the last 3 years you should – make sure you re-optimize it or bring in an SEO professional who can help you. It’s an investment that will more than pay for itself. If you’re interested in church SEO or SEO for your Christian school, ministry or business, let’s schedule a time to talk.
Thoughts?
- How important do you think it is to re-optimize a redesigned site?
- Do you have any success or horror stories about re-optimization?
5 Comments
Great tips Paul! I was wondering, you mentioned keywords. Do you use any keyword search tool? what tool do you personally recommend?
Hi Emmerey, for keywords searching, if you want to search related keywords, ScrapeBox works. 🙂
Thanks Robby! 🙂
Hi Emmerey, we use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner and Moz to do our keyword research.
Thanks Paul! I will try those tools out.