" I want a website that increases my sales and allows me to appear first on Google, ahead of my main competitor ." This is the type of phrase we often hear as digital strategists. And this is quite normal on your part.
However, is just increasing your sales enough? For example, are you happy with generating just one additional sale from your new site? The answer is most likely no: this is why you need to discover the 10 essential steps to plan a website redesign.
1. Measure current results
What is the primary goal of redesigning your site? Obviously, it is to have a more efficient site! Whether by its speed, the number of visitors, conversions, online sales; the important thing is to improve. Here's why it's important to write down all the relevant data from your current website before changing it to an improved version. It will be important to be able to compare the new site with the old one to determine if your investment was good.
There is a lot of data available to you when it comes to your site's performance. Of course, you can make a copy of anything you find in your Google Analytics account, but are you actually going to use all of this? (Hint, the answer is no!)
The ideal is to go and find the metrics that are important to you. If you have a transactional site, sales will surely be an important metric for you, while visits will be important for a "showcase" site.
Among the most used metrics available are usually in the following 4 categories:
- Traffic: Visitors, unique visitors, ratio of recurring visitors, etc.
- Behavior: Average duration of visits, average number of pages viewed, bounce rate, etc.
- SEO: Number of pages indexed, your keywords with the best ranking, the landing pages with the best conversion rate, the keywords you were trying to rank for, etc.
- Conversions: How many new prospects contact you through your site each month, how many customers or sales does your site generate per month, etc.
2. Set goals
Identify the stakeholders
Stakeholders are the different actors on whom the project will have an impact and who will therefore have a great impact on the project. These parts do not all have the same role or the same importance.
Suppose you have been selling food products for 10 years. You want to have a transactional site and you are using a web agency. As a business manager, you will have a significant impact on the project, because you will be working hand in hand with the agency. On the other hand, the government body that ensures that the nutritional information of foods sold online is accurate will also have an impact to consider.
Managing the expectations of these stakeholders must be done throughout the project, so we must not neglect their identification in this first phase.
The expected benefits and constraints of the project
We are not yet talking about objectives here. You still need to be able to clearly define the desired benefits of the project. What do you hope to do with your website: sell, serve or inform?
Then, you have to foresee the constraints, which makes it possible to delimit the scope of the project. We often find these constraints divided into different categories:
- Resources : they can be financial, human, material and many other things. For example: I have a budget of $ 30,000; my graphic designer is only available 3 days a week;
- Results : relates to what is expected of the final product. For example, the site must be able to accommodate 10,000 people at the same time;
- Performance : we still have doubts or we are in the unknown as to the possibility of delivering the expected results. For example, we do not know if the chosen CMS will be able to support the quantity of products for sale on the site.
- Deadlines : we define a very strict timetable from which we cannot deviate. For example, the website must be accessible to the public on June 21, last deadline.
Identify your target
Who are you going to talk to? Are you going to reach the same audience as in your store? What is the size of the potential market that you can reach?
In order to best answer these questions, you have to develop personas !
In the planning process, your personas allow you to understand who the target customers are, in addition to understanding the user's vision and not just an average internet user. Personas also allow you to deliver a product or service that meets specific and understood needs and engage stakeholders to better understand who the message is for.
Define the objectives
One point to be made is that of knowing how to differentiate between objectives, strategies and tactics. In strategic planning, you will only focus on the first two. It's still too early to take on the task of defining the tactics - this is not where you will be able to tell which images you are going to post on Instagram!
Objectives allow you to answer the question "What to do", while strategies allow you to answer one or more objectives to determine "How to do".
Formulate your objectives
The strategic goals of your web project are not the same as your business goals. However, it is important that they come together to make it an integrated strategy, relevant to the success of your business. For this, an objective must respect a certain structure called SMART .
Once the objectives have been defined, they must be:
- Detail : imperatives / desirable / nice-to-have
- Prioritize : maximum / minimum priority
- Qualify : according to the associated constraints
Remember that you can set goals for all of the metrics you wrote down from your current site to monitor your improvement.
Conversion goals
If you know the number of sales or customers you're targeting to get each month, you can work your way up the conversion funnel and figure out how many visits you'll need each month to reach your goal. You already have a good idea of the conversion percentage at each stage on your current site.
Anonymous visitors ->% become leads ->% become opportunities ->% become sales opportunities -> [Customer objective]
Performance indicators
The SMART goals you set and the effort you put in should be measurable. We need to establish what are called performance indicators . These indicators can be qualitative, quantitative or financial.
A performance indicator reflects a success to be valued with your superiors, your team and quite simply for yourself. Your metrics vary by industry and type of website because they are personalized.
Here are some examples of performance indicators depending on the nature of your site:
E-commerce:
- Total sales
- Average shopping cart
- Conversion rate
- Shopping cart abandonment rate
Contents
- Duration of visits
- Number of page views
- Rebound rate
- Number of newsletter subscriptions
Lead generation
- Number of new leads
- Downloaded documents
- Visitor to prospect conversion rate
- Ratio of sales generated online and offline
Customer service
- Decreased duration of visits
- Number of incoming calls to the call center
- Qualitative customer satisfaction
- Number of visits to key sections
3. Analyze the competition
Identify him
Remember that the environment in which your business operates offline and online is different. However, both are important to be aware of when it comes to web strategic planning. Research the field, observe and take note. Because while studying the competition online is just one click away, going to physical stores can be a good idea. We can discover strategies that are not visible on their site: how do they communicate offline? Are they using location marketing? Are they using mobile in a particular way?
Determine the opportunities and threats in your environment
Next, determine the opportunities and threats in your environment. Market opportunities can lead you to differentiate yourself, to reveal your competitive advantage when coupled with your strengths. Threats must be countered and contained. It is not easy to introspect oneself, but it is a necessary evil that can lead to improving many things and avoiding big mistakes.
Analyzing your competition to understand its behavior is essential and allows you to identify best practices.
4. Audit the strengths and weaknesses of your business
Web strategic planning allows you to understand the needs of your business. By this we also mean business needs as well as internal needs. Your website and the strategy that goes with it can be the opportunity to address important issues within your organization. It is then necessary to carry out a diagnosis of your strengths and weaknesses. A strength is an asset you have that can join a market opportunity and turn into a real competitive advantage. A weakness is an aspect of your business that needs to be improved.
Additionally, you can list the strengths of your current site. For example, what content is shared the most, what customers tell you they like about your site, which pages receive quality inbound links, etc. These forces will have to be replicated in the new site.
5. Define the value proposition
The value proposition should be easy to identify at a glance on your website. You can keep the same proposal you had before and communicate it better if you think it was misunderstood, or come up with a new proposal.
Several types of value propositions are available to you:
- By price: You have to make it clear that your product is the cheapest.
"My offer is the cheapest" - By differentiation: Explain why your product is good for the customer and not that of your competitors.
"My product is the only one to offer this great feature" - For ease: Explain why your product or service makes a complex experience so much easier. For example, travel sites that group together several other sites.
"My product will save you an incredible amount of time"
6. Identify the offers to put forward
The deals are events that advance the prospects for the next step in the process. It usually starts with a call to action that leads to a landing page where the visitor fills out a form. In exchange, he receives a resource, a free audit, training or any resource you want to make available to him. We have already made a list of previously successful resources. You can also decide to create resources for prospect requests that you have had on a recurring basis. Remember that if you are doing a Growth-Driven site, you should only include the most important offers.
7. Develop the strategy
If we go back to our original goal, you could opt for content and SEO strategies. But be careful, a strategy must not come out of nowhere. It is imperative that it be the subject of a careful study based on the conclusions drawn during the definition of your needs and the study of your environment. A mistake that should not be made is to confuse strategy and tactics. Tactics are just ways of implementing your strategy that meets your goals.
Assign roles
We have seen that the first step in web strategic planning is to identify the stakeholders. Now with all the information on the project in hand with the following steps, we must decide who will be responsible for what. Please note, there is no question here of distributing tasks. Remember, even the tactics haven't been defined yet, so there's no need to rush. We are talking about determining who is in charge of tasks such as:
- Write the content
- Provide the images
- Set up the content strategy
- Integrate the content on the chosen platform,
- Check the quality
Planning usually ends with a first deliverable, the specifications, which is a reflection document serving as the basis for the process of creating or redesigning a website.
8. Tree structure
It's time to put together the tree structure for your future site. Remember that if you take a "Growth-Driven" approach you must prioritize the pages you want to upload in your initial version and limit yourself to the 20% most important.
9. Creation of models
Although this is not outright planning we will consider the mockups to be part of this phase. For many, the models are only a stage where a vision is put into visual form. However, we will go a little further here. When creating models, it is important to take the persona into account and refer to your strategy. It is about much more than a "design" it is an important part of the strategy. You want to make the experience easy and enjoyable for the user while allowing them to perform the actions that you want them to take (such as placing an order).
10. Content
The last step in your planning is to create the content that will fill your pages. You must not only create relevant content but which will allow you to position yourself on the keywords that are important to your business. We won't go into the details of a content strategy here, but I trust you to educate yourself on the subject if you haven't already!
And on your side, how do you plan a website redesign? Are there any steps you would like to add? Leave us a comment!