Websites come in all shapes and sizes. We see this constantly at Rock Solid Marketing when clients come to us with websites that are all over the spectrum in terms of quality, size, content, and speed.
While you should absolutely be able to see improvement in search rankings no matter what kind of website you have, the fact remains that the better your website, the better chance you have at increasing your search rankings.
Website quality can be pretty subjective though, so what does it even mean to have a good website?
We believe a good website should have a great design, excellent content structure, and reasonably fast loading time. These are things that make a website both user-friendly and praiseworthy by Google.
Therefore, if you are planning to work on your website’s SEO, it makes sense to improve your site first so that you set yourself up for maximum SEO success.
eCreators went through a website redesign before engaging us for SEO services.
As a Melbourne SEO agency, here are two scenarios we always want to avoid when providing our SEO services:
Optimising a Poorly Designed Website
Akin to “polishing a turd”, there’s only so much you can do to optimise a bad website. If your site is slow to load, poorly designed or organised, and lacks content, you already have several strikes against you in Google’s eyes. Even if you did the best possible job in optimising your site for your chosen keywords, you’ll only be able to rank so high because Google would rather reward the better-designed sites.
The fact is, having a poorly designed website limits your ability to rank highly in keyword searches. You’d do better to get your site redesigned before working on its SEO. Focus on building up your content so that it’s informative, relevant, and has plenty of room for naturally working in keywords. Choose a new site theme that’s simple, loads fast, and is easy to navigate.
Optimising a Website Right Before It’s Redesigned
We’ve had a couple of clients with lackluster websites come to us seeking Melbourne SEO services. Their sites weren’t terrible though, and certainly had enough to work with in order for us to get them an increase in their keyword rankings.
The bigger issue was that after just a couple months of optimising these sites, the clients decided to pull the trigger on a website redesign. From an SEO perspective, this was not ideal because:
- We had to stop the optimisation process while the site was being redone, hence losing our momentum and seeing the search rankings plateau for awhile.
- After the redesign, we had to go back and redo some of the optimisation that had been lost with the change of WordPress themes.
Doing a website overhaul shortly after kicking off your SEO efforts inevitably results in wasted time and money. So if you’re at all thinking about redesigning your website, make sure you take care of the redesign first before diving headfirst into SEO.