Marketing Update: Mapping Your Page URLs – Website Redesign Planning
Nate Stockard: Hey, everybody, happy Friday. I’m out here trying to catch– you’re on a lunch break, I’m on a lunch break, trying one of the spots by the water that we enjoy Outriggers out here in Kemah, Texas. We’re finishing up this week about redesigning your website and planning for it and all of the things you need to do in order to come to the table before you even get started. One, to save some money but also know what in the world you’re talking about.
As we round out today, I want to touch on one more thing before we get out of here, let you get to your weekend, is page URL mapping. Mapping your existing pages. First of all, what does this even mean? To start with, actually, creating a spreadsheet, and if you’ve got our kit already you probably already have the worksheet, you make a list of all the pages on your existing site.
WILL THE URLS CHANGE?
The thing is those pages actually rank for something on your website. They rank within the search engines, within Google, Bing, Yahoo, all of those. You want to make sure that you have a list of those and link those and map them to new pages on your website. Because when you redesign, you’re probably going to change URLs. What used to be, maybe, services right now, may now be manufacturing services or something like that based on how you change your site on the redesign. Highly recommend getting all of these listed out into a spreadsheet and then linking them to a new page.
WHY EXISTING PAGES MATTER
Why does this really matter? At the end of the day, if they are ranking somewhere, you launch a new site and you have new URLs, the search engines are going to find those old URLs and say, “Oh, these pages are missing.” Trust me, Google does not want to show a 404 page missing thing anywhere in their search engine so as soon as they index it, they’re going to get rid of this page because it’s not found. But if you put in a redirect, you work with your programmers to put in a redirect, Google goes, “Oh, this is where the page is. Now, I need to rank this page for the same place of what we’ve been ranking this other page for.” It helps you retain rankings that you already have as such, you don’t lose it.
Otherwise, your whole new site is going to look like the whole new thing hasn’t been on even though you may have had a website up for the past five years. Let’s bring it all together. Why do we care about planning with the redesign? Most of the time, people don’t think about actually extensive planning as they’re getting ready to do a redesign. They think, “Hey, we’re going to get with programmers. We’re going to get with designers. They’re going to create a new website. It’s going to be awesome. Let’s get it done.” And put all that workload onto your programmer, either that’s in-house or a design firm, something that you hire. The problem with that is, they’re going to have to guess at so many of these things that you could put together with your planning worksheet.
THE VALUE OF PLANNING A REDESIGN
The reason we’ve been talking about this all week is two things. One, you need to be more educated with your site and what it’s trying to do. You know your business better than firms you can bring in does. You need to connect your website with your business. The other side of that is you could probably save some money. As you bring all of these stuff to the table, your team already knows exactly what you want to do. You know the scope. They can get a more well-defined scope that maybe otherwise would have been a bit looser and you could probably save some money on the overall cost and save some time by this whole process of going through this discovery you’ve already completed. You save that time with your design firm and get the project done even faster.
As we talked on day two, we have a website redesign kit that we wanted to get you guys to download. It’s a free download that gives you all the worksheets that you need, in order to go through all this planning process. I highly recommend you do it in the order that we suggest. There’s a PDF in there that explains the order and what each one’s for because it will help you start to build on one building block to the next and it’ll all makes sense for you. Guys, Nate, it’s Friday, we’ll check out and get some of this lunch. Enjoy this beautiful weather here in Kemah. Hope you guys check in with us next week, Monday. Look forward the Monday marketing minute. If you need another URL of that kit, make a comment. It’s in the post but comment below and we’ll send it to you. Catch you guys on Monday. Hope you have a great rest of your weekend.
[00:03:34] [END OF AUDIO]
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