So, you’re going through a website redesign. Awesome! It’s always a good choice to keep your website updated, so that you’re not giving the impression that your company or organization is behind the times. It’s so easy for web surfers to quickly click that “back” button if they don’t like what they see.
Have you thought about what’s going to happen to the content on your website yet? If you have and “I’m just going to copy paste from the old site to the new one” is your answer, please take a moment to read this and reconsider.
5 reasons why you should rewrite your content during a website redesign
Your old content is old
Whether you wrote your content 2 months ago or 2 years ago, going through a website redesign is the perfect time to revamp it. The content you put on your site is arguably the most important part of SEO.
Therefore, if you want your audience to find your website, your content needs to be carefully crafted. This is important to not only represent your business, but also to work to your advantage in drawing visits to your site.
Your old content might not fit your new design
Your new pages will most likely be laid out differently than your old ones. The new pages might have spaces for paragraphs of content you don’t have on your old site, or you might have too much content on your old site for your nice new streamlined look. You want your content and your design to work together, not look odd.
You might have new pages—or fewer pages
Before the design process even begins, you need a sitemap. You need to figure out how your content will be laid out in the best possible way for users to navigate. What content is most important to your users? What can be buried a little?
While going through this process, you will most likely find content that’s either not worth keeping, really outdated, or could be combined with another page. Or, you might find you’re missing important content, and add a new page on your new site for it.
The redesign will cause you to rethink your users.
People often make discoveries about their users when going through a redesign. For instance, say you’re looking around at competitor websites to get ideas for what you do and don’t want on your own.
You’re putting yourself in the mindset of a customer, and you realize that there’s an important question many of your customers have that isn’t answered on your site, but is there on your competitors’ sites. You’re missing out! Now you’ve got to write that content for your own site.
SEO: keywords & metadata
Yeah yeah, you’ve heard over and over again that keywords are important, and you’ve gone in and thrown some into your content. Going through a redesign is the perfect time to rethink and rediscover your top keywords, and then craft great content using them. Do some research around what your users are searching for.
What questions are they asking about what you do or provide? Each page should have one main keyword/topic focus. Remember to write for humans, though – mentioning your keyword around 4 times on a page is enough. Putting it in more than that will make you look over SEO’d.
Need help rewriting your content? Reach out to Thrive Today. We are a full-service web design agency offering search engine optimized, quality content writing services.
