New Website Redesign: Any Design Comments or SEO Suggestions?

[Mike.Goracke]

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

[Mike.Goracke]

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.

[RonMedlin]

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.

[TomRayner]

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!

[Mike.Goracke]

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

[TomRayner]

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!