New Website Redesign: Any Design Comments or SEO Suggestions?
-
Hi!
We recently launched our new website after MONTHS of work. Now that it is live, we are looking to fine tune the design and SEO efforts.
This is our new website.
And for reference, this is our old website.
Any and all comments on design and SEO would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for your help!
Mike
-
Hi Ron,
We did the design in house. Our graphic designer and I sat down and just started critiquing all of our competitors. We found things we liked about sites and things we didn't. Then we took a hard left turn... we started looking at web design websites, hip and trendy consumer product pages (we do B2B), we actually even looked at a really cool ice cream distributor's website to get some inspiration.
BlueGlass posted this article last June on 21 Tools to Unlock Your Creative Genius which definitely does get your mind working in a different way.
And here is an AWESOME site that has "the best designs" - which is pretty true to its name.
Once we had our inspiration, we started wireframing and drafting things. When we had the basic idea of what we wanted the pages to look like, we paused and made sure that it would be able to accommodate our SEO plan as well. We made some changes for SEO purposes... then just went with it.
Hope this brief information gives you an idea of how we were able to come up with our design.
Mike
PS our graphic designer and his brother do some freelance webdesign work. PM me and I can get you his contact information.
-
Do you mind if I ask who designed the site for you. Did you do it in house or through an agency? So hard to find a good designer these days.
-
You're welcome Mike!
Yep, getting a bit obsessed with GTMetrix at the moment. Great resource though and your score on there already is good.
Great job again!
-
Thank you for your response Tom!
Spot on about the H1s. I noticed this in my on page report card and that is definitely something I am going to look into fixing ASAP!
You recommended GTMetrix in another post and I ran that test a few days ago. We are looking into leveraging browser caching. I just need to sit down with our webmaster and explain the benefits of it to our site and our visitors.
Thanks for the awesome and prompt feedback Tom!
Mike
-
Hi Mike
Visually I think that looks fantastic, while still offering a great amount of readable content for a crawler. Think you've done an excellent job with design.
Couple of things off the bat that I can see. Your meta description exceeds 155 characters on the homepage - which means that it might be truncated in the search engine results. With your call to action at the end of that description ("Request a free demonstration today."), it's at risk of being ignored and not shown by Google, which would be a great shame.
I see you're using 5 H1 tags but 0 H2s - now the H1 tag definitely has lost its strength that it used to have in the rankings, but to have 5 is sending a somewhat conflicting message to Google about what the site might be about. Would it be possible to have one H1 and the other 4 as H2? It might not be ideal, as I don't think you'd want to interfere with the design too much as I think it looks great. If the H2 is not that different from the H1 I think it might be an idea to do that - it gives a nice sort of hierarchy for the crawler in that way.
Here's a link to a GTMetrix speed report for your site. The scores are pretty good, but there's a key priority fix there that could make a key difference for your site and that's leveraging browser caching. If you click on it, click on the "What's this mean?" button in the top right and then the "read more" link that pops up, you'll get a guide on how to do it. It's quite an easy and quick fix, so I'd recommend it.
Other than that, the design looks great, it's a nice clear text, the site architecture looks good and interlinks to your pages well, title tags look good - I've not done keyword research for those terms, but they look good ones to target - all in all I think it's a great looking site with a solid SEO foundation, that with a few tweaks can be really strong.
Think you have an awful lot to be proud of here Mike, great job!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ranking drop after new website
Hi there, I have a new client who has just had a new website built (by someone else). It was quite a major change as it was 12 years old and has just been moved to Wordpress. However although they are by and large happy with the new site, they have lost a lot of their rankings in Google. The content and menu structure is apparently identical. I told them I didn't think this was unusual but I'm not sure how easy it will be to get them ranking again. Where are they likely to be starting from? Is it a case of starting from the beginning or will there be some residual ranking capability left over? Or can they expect a full recovery over time? I was going to start by looking to see if things like tagging and meta data has been filled in (I will add the site to my Moz account) but is there any way of comparing the old site with the new for SEO purposes? Thanks so much, Sarah.
Web Design | | Frog-Marketing0 -
Traffic Dropping To Website
Hi In Google Analytics:
Web Design | | SEOguy1
I have noticed up to 50% of traffic coming to the website drops off at the home page point,
and drops further from other pages on the site. I realise some may possibly say that this could be down to various factors such as server issues, poor web design, or the wrong traffic reaching the site I have did corrected the following: There was an issue with there being www.domain.com and www.domain.com/home, Screaming Frog and Moz showed that these both had duplicate meta tagging issues. Initially I had created a separate page called 'home' to include in the main nav bar under the slider, but yesterday I replaced this page with a request in the functions.php to place 'home' in the nav bar as a redirect back to the home www.domain.com page. This works great. So I now have the following 301 permanent redirects: non-www to www resolve in the htaccess file, plus 2 permanent 301 redirects in the nav bar. I wonder if this is acceptable protocol re the nav bar redirects, and I wonder if you could possibly advise if the actions that I have taken will have any negative impact on the web seo, link structure, crawlability or indexing. Thanks.0 -
How would a redesign, content update and URL change affect ranking?
Hi guys, I have a question that I suspect there is no simple true or false answer to, but perhaps someone has done the same thing as we're pondering wether or not to do? We're taking over an existing site that ranks very well on all the important keywords and is obviously very well liked by Google. The site is today hosted on a sub-domain (xxx.domain.com). When taking over, we'll have to redesign the site and recreate most of the content on the site (unique). The site structure, URLs, incoming links etc. will remain exactly the same. Since we are recreating the site, we also have the opportunity to move the site off the sub-domain and on to the main domain (domain.com/xxx - 85/100 Moz rank) and do a 301 Permanent Redirect on all old URLs. Our long-time experience is that content on the main domain, ranks way better than the sub-domain. The big question is wether or not Google will punish us for both changing the content and the location of the site at the same time? Cheers!
Web Design | | mattbs
Matt0 -
Site Doing Horrible After Redesign
Hello Fellow Forum Members: Thank you all for taking the time to read this. This is in follow up to one of my previous questions, but I now have more information. I will try to be as concise as possible and want to sincerely thank anybody who invests time in answering this. Around February 9, 2013, we launched our new site on the Bigcommerce platform. We moved from Volusion after 6 years. We had paid the Bigcommerce partner for an upgraded 301 redirect package as I was thoroughly concerned about losing rankings. By the end of February our rankings were diminishing. We expected a slight dip due to the new site. As of May, our organic traffic had dropped by 82%. Google WMT is showing 1500+ 404 errors. Many have to do with review page type URLs and some were just plain never redirected apparently. In May, we hired a wonderful SEO company that is a heavy contributor to the Moz community. They have been generous and wonderful to work with. By the end of this last week it was determined that most of the coding suggestions our SEO was making could NOT be implemented in Bigcommerce because Bigcommerce will not allow access to the PHP files by our developer, thus hindering the execution of these suggestions. Some of these were move the blog to the root, use canonical on the home page, use canonical for pagination, stop the indexing of https URLs and a few more. Today, June 25 we are at a complete loss and trying to just keep our business alive. The opinion of both the SEO and the developer is that my choice of Bigcommerce as a platform was not the best. So my main question is what are the odds our rankings have decreased due to the lack of 301 redirects during our migration to Bigcommerce versus the rankings decreasing do to Bigcommerce being a bad choice as a platform? We are being advised to redevelop our entire site on an Open Source platorm such as Wordpress or Magento, but if that's not needed I certainly don't want to have to do that. I hope I have provided a decent amount of history and information. Thank you for any help/advice you are willing to offer.
Web Design | | josh3300 -
Does Google penalize duplicate website design?
Hello, We are very close to launching five new websites, all in the same business sector. Because we would like to keep our brand intact, we are looking to use the same design on all five websites. My question is, will Google penalize the sites if they have the same design? Thank you! Best regards,
Web Design | | Tiberiu
Tiberiu0 -
Optimizing a Wordpress Blog For SEO
Besides the standard Yoast for SEO plugin tweaks, I'm researching best practices when setting up a wordpress blog. In this instance, the "front end" of the site would be hardcoded static pages designed for an e-commerce site, while there would also be a /blog/ attached to the site - for blog posts, fresh content, etc.
Web Design | | GKLA0 -
Best Webhosting Suggestions??
Good morning my fellow Mozzers! I am currently looking at adding some diversity to my current web hosting and I was hoping I could get some suggestions. I dont currently need a VPS or Dedicated Server, I just need some shared hosting, you know, packeges that are sub $20 a month...i mean i will pay more than that, but so far everything i look at that meets my needs(basic hosting, email, ect...). This is for client sites and they are growing in number somewhat rapidly. I currently host with GoDaddy and they are amazing in the support department, but I do question whether their servers are causing slow page loads ect...but all in all I am happy with them. I have used Netword Solutions in the past, but left them because i was not a big fan of talking to support people in india and malasia. I do think that their servers might have performed better than GoDaddy so i am not ruling them out at this point i am looking for a provider that has excellent support and who has servers that are not so overloaded the can render pages and content slowly. Performance is very important to me. I am not looking for the cheapest, I am looking for the overall best. Thanks in advance SEOmoz family!!!
Web Design | | WebbyNabler0 -
Looking for a website review.
Hello, Our web team and I have been building a e-commerce website for the past couple of months. The project is nearing its end and I was just wondering if there are any big issues on this website that jump out at anyone, besides the fact that it hasn't been submitted anywhere or there has been no link building done yet. The website is wheelchairparts.com All feedback and constructive criticism is appreciated! Thanks!
Web Design | | Mike.Bean0