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 so 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 fan of the idea that you should really thrash 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
Category B
Resources
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 scene 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 happy.
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 radically – 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 to product pages.
Work through each page detailing the goal for that page and then outline the content that supports that and update the website plan template.
6. SEO specifics
The planning is important, but we must document a few SEO specifics to ensure this build aspect will be handled correctly.
Keep the old site live on a temporary URL if possible.
Create a list of redirections from the old pages to the new ones.
Migrate content, page titles and meta descriptions for high-performing pages.
Update external backlinks where possible.
Monitor performance after launch (rankings, traffic, impressions).
Factoring in these five areas will ensure the main SEO points are covered.
6. Your website plan
At this point, you should have a comprehensive but concise plan outlining what is needed on your new site.
The plan should cover:
Existing rankings and traffic.
Goals for the project.
Customer segments.
Website structure and sitemap.
Page scoping.
SEO specifics (redirects, etc.).
Most people don’t do this. They create a super skinny brief and leave it to the web developers.
But the web developers don’t know your business, so you have to put in the work to ensure the new site retains and improves your SEO (while also hitting the likely myriad of other goals that trickle down from management to marketing).
While it may seem like an additional step, planning will save you time, money and pain while improving your overall results – a win-win.
In a nutshell, you will get better results by doing the research and planning work.
Launch and beyond
The final aspects to consider are the monitoring of the launch and what your marketing and SEO KPIs are to measure results.
We always expect some turbulence, but keeping a close eye on the Search Console and your KPIs will help you spot issues and squash them quickly.
SEO-friendly website planning to retain and improve traffic
Most websites could be better planned.
If you follow the simple steps here, you will have done more pre-design planning than 99% of other website projects, which can help you join the 1% of companies that get all the results.
Ensure you understand what works currently and where you want to go. Weave that into the planning for your new site and prepare to fly high.
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