Website planning to maximize SEO [Template]

Website planning and SEO

To ensure your new website retains and improves your SEO, it is beneficial to have a clearly outlined SEO strategy and articulate this in a straightforward SEO plan.

The worst scenario in any website design project is when unforeseen problems or changes occur during development.

A well-thought-out plan with input from all stakeholders helps minimize this. Moreover, if the client changes their mind or the scope expands (which it always does), you have the document to refer to the original scope and justify the necessary fee increases.

I wish I had a dollar for every time we reviewed a nearly finished new site only to discover that SEO hadn’t been considered, putting its success at risk.

Recently, we worked on a six-figure project for a business that thrives on organic traffic. The project would essentially destroy all the hard-won SEO.

This took several months and likely another six figures in PPC spending (to replace what was free SEO traffic from an SEO vs. PPC perspective), as well as additional SEO time and redevelopment. You want to avoid that if possible.

We’ve also seen other sites that had so thoroughly damaged SEO traffic that the only reasonable approach was to revert to the previous site.

It’s safe to say that ensuring you retain SEO traffic and set the stage for improvements isn’t something you can leave to chance.

The approach outlined here combines a fairly standard website planning method, which, executed well, will save a lot of time, money, and hassle, with the type of work needed to retain existing SEO traffic while building a robust platform for further SEO development.

The output of this process should be a document that either serves as the foundation of the website brief or is integrated into a traditional brief.

Note: Where the SEO brief and website brief are separate entities, I always recommend reviewing the final website brief to ensure the SEO brief has been incorporated before the project starts.

There are five key steps to go through to create your SEO-friendly website blueprint:

1. Existing rankings and traffic

You must understand your traffic and where it originates.

To do this, spend some time in Google Analytics and Google Search Console to identify:

• High-ranking keywords.
• High-traffic keywords.
• High-traffic content.
• High-opportunity pages.
• High-opportunity keywords.

Your aim is to clearly document what currently works. These must be included in the new site.

If high-traffic content is removed, not properly optimized, or lost in the new site’s hierarchy, you’re inviting problems.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a goldmine of SEO information and will give you the straight story on your rankings and traffic.

Here, you’ll see high-opportunity keywords and pages with many impressions but few clicks.

• Visit Search Console
• Performance > Search Results

The primary information you're looking for is in the queries and pages tabs. You can sort this by clicks (traffic) and impressions (which is an opportunity).

Work through this information and document your findings in the template.

Crawl data

Crawl your website and save a copy of the crawl (Screaming Frog is a cost-effective or free way of doing this under 500 pages).

This will allow you to check links to the page and compare with the new site if (and when) problems arise.

SEO tools

You can also use any SEO tools for rank tracking.

However, I prefer Search Console and Google Analytics for this as they give you real data and insight, not the extrapolated data the typical SEO tools provide, which can often be inaccurate and misleading.

Dig deeper: Website redesign SEO checklist: Retaining and improving SEO

2. SEO and website goals

Goals are essential to any project. Starting with clear goals helps you understand your destination, making it easier to find the right path forward.

Goals provide you with a tool for evaluating all decisions throughout the project.

Will doing something help us meet our goals? If not, don’t do it. If so, proceed!

You may have goals for the website project overall, ideally these will be hierarchical. For instance, we might have one super goal that states the goal of the new website is to generate more leads.

You may then have sub-goals such as improving SEO and improving conversion rates that work towards the main goal.

Remember to make your SEO goals specific and measurable, so SMART goals are helpful here.

Overall, you may need a hierarchy of goals here that covers:

• Website Goal: Generate more leads/sales.
• SEO Goal 1: Rank our service pages more highly.
• SEO Goal 2: Rank our upper funnel marketing content highly.

You may also find it useful to look at things you want to avoid with the new site. Determining what you are aiming for and what you are steering clear of can be just as helpful, if not more so.

• Anti-goal: Avoid having a site that is essentially no different from our competitors.

Document your goals in the website plan template and move on.

3. Audience and customer segments

Carefully define your target audience(s) along with some considerations regarding your competitors.

Remember, in marketing, targeting everyone is targeting no one.

That is not to say you can’t target multiple audiences, but you do need to consider each audience and factor this into the structure and segmentation of your new site.

We want to carefully consider the goals, problems, and tasks of our target audience to ensure our business goals, website goals, and the goals of the people we serve are all closely aligned.

Audience questions

We want to start by simply identifying the different audiences: men, women, students, Gen X, Millennials, etc.

For each audience:

• Audience name.
• Demographics (age, sex, location).
• What is the problem or goal of the target audience?
• Where do they hang out or find information online?

The information you gather here will help you when it comes to structuring your site to support the individual needs of each audience (which, in turn, makes optimizing for each audience much easier).

To explore each customer segment in more depth, you can use the SEO Value Proposition Template and SCAMPER to understand your customers and identify the content you need to hit your goals.

Remember that Google wants you to focus on creating helpful, people-first content. To do this, you need to understand your people (audience) and ensure you are writing for them.

This process feeds into your SEO like no other, so spend the time getting into the minds of your audience segments. Your SEO will thank you for it.

Note all of this down in the website plan template and move on.

4. Structure and sitemap

A sitemap provides a simple overview of the new site and can be cross-referenced with the existing goals.

For instance, the new sitemap should include high-traffic pages on the current site that drive business performance.

Sitemaps help gather feedback from all stakeholders and facilitate difficult conversations during the planning stages. Addressing these issues early can prevent problems later on with delivery, timelines, and budgets.

I am a big advocate of the idea that you should really hash things out at this point and good ideas get strengthened and remain, while bad ideas can die here – rather than in costly development.

Creating your sitemap

You want to create a simple bullet-point sitemap in the first instance.

• Home
• About Us
• Category A
  • Sub Category A1
    • Detail Page
• Category B
  • Sub Category B1
    • Detail Page
• Resources
  • Article A
  • Article B
• Contact

I recommend writing this all down in a spreadsheet so you have clarity and numbering for all pages (which will be useful in the next steps).

You can use your favorite drawing tool to create your sitemap. Draw.io has a useful set of templates, including various maps, that you can use for site mapping (all of which are saved to Google Docs).

A visual sitemap can be useful for the major categories and sections of the site and can aid in getting feedback from stakeholders.

The key takeaway here is that we want to create a sitemap that is segmented by our target audiences and serves the overarching marketing objectives.

If our SEO goals are to retain traffic and create an optimized structure, then we can assess that here.

Key pieces of content that have been identified should be recreated on the new site within an optimized structure that sets the stage for growth.

Remember, the hierarchy here will inform you of your site’s folder structure, which helps provide context for each document.

This, in turn, helps you structure your keywords from high-level broad keywords to more specific categories and longer-tail product/service keywords. The structure is key, so spend time here until you are satisfied.

5. Page scoping

The next step of the planning process is to determine what content will be on each page.

Based on the level of detail you want to use here, you can either create columns in your spreadsheet sitemap that you created previously or go into more detail.

Typically, for each page, we should include:

• Goal of the page.
• Functionality / Features (e.g., forms).
• Content (images, text, video etc).
• SEO (Notes, Page Title, Meta Description).
• Notes.

The SEO aspect here is fairly obvious, and if we have a high-performing page currently, we want to ensure the main content is recreated.

There is little point in adding a page and changing things drastically – minimize the variables wherever possible.

We want to examine the page’s goal and ensure that its functionality and content support it.

Some example goals for pages are:

• Generate exposure from SEO (to feed remarketing).
• Generate leads.
• Funnel users

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