To the world outside of your colleagues, clients, and partners, your
website is your company. It's the digital reflection of your brand.
Launching a new website isn't just about updating your CMS and content,
it's also a brand refresh – your opportunity to reshape your company
from the inside out.
It's been a transformative year for iAcquire. We've transformed our
off-page SEO agency into a full-service digital marketing company, with
offerings ranging from large-scale social media campaigns to on-page
content strategy. Our old site simply didn't reflect what we are capable
of.
Before:
After:
On our journey to align our brand with image with our company's
offerings, we learned some vital lessons. Here is a roadmap to
successfully refreshing your brand
and your site:
Content Strategy
A content strategy is your website's master plan. It lays the
groundwork for the planning, research, creation, development,
implementation, and measurement of everything that lives on your site.
This has to come first. Without it you are flying blind.
Goals
Why are you launching a new site? What do you hope to achieve with
your new site? How will this new site be better than your current site?
Before any sort of execution, our marketing and strategy team created
a near 30 page creative brief that was fueled by specific goals we
wanted our new website to achieve, and backed up with persona-driven
market research.
Audience
In order to take any next steps you must clearly define your
audience. Generally, you will need to serve multiple audience types.
Doing this wisely is mission critical if you want highly converting and
meaningful content.
- Access Audience Data: Use Experian Simmons and
Nielsen Prizm to capture large-scale consumer survey data. Additionally,
Facebook has the best insight on top-level and granular audience size
by region. They present this data via the Facebook Ad Creation Tool.
- Run Surveys: Get an up to date pulse on customer
sentiment and market sentiment using Google Surveys or SurveyMonkey. I'm
a big fan of Google's Coke vs. soda vs. pop survey.
- Define Need States: Use the survey process,
in-house questionnaires, and other customer-related data to come up with
need states. Map these need states to keywords, personas, and pages as
you develop content. As an example, we've developed a persona called
Content Katie, and she has a need state called "Upgrade SEO," which
means that she thinks her current SEO efforts are lacking resources. We
can now map that need state to web pages, keyword ads, display ads, and
more.
- Create Personas: Creating audience personas helps
all creative, content, and allows marketing stakeholders to maintain
uniformity. Leverage audience market data, survey results, and need
states to create personas and user stories. Nielsen has done a good job
creating default personas for many of America's top audience segments.
Check out their active library of the top 66 personas. Use this template and create your own three to five personas.
Voice and Tone
Depending on your audience you need to make some determinations about
your voice and tone. If you're a medical provider your voice might be
one of an authoritative figure, strictly the facts. Your tone might be
direct, to the point, and objective-oriented. But you may also want to
take an approach that is more down-to-earth, and not confusing or
threatening. It really depends specifically on the needs of your
business.
Here's our approach for your reference:
Not iAcquire Brand Voice
"At iAcquire we understand that off-page optimization involves
monitoring your domain authority, anchor text distribution and staying
abreast of algorithmic fluctuations to ensure you maintain your
visibility in the SERPs. We've rallied a team of developers to build the
iRank platform which turns outreach into a scientific process."
iAcquire Brand Voice
Experience shows that even with great content off-page optimization
is difficult. At iAcquire we've built the dream off-page solution called
iRank which handles all the heavy lifting and allows us to give our
clients transparency and results.
Tone
- Authentic but not Brash
- Fun but not Silly
- Authoritative but not Persnickety
- Questioning but not Rebellious
- Informal but not Unprofessional
- Cool but not Unapproachable
- Effective but not Complicated
Governance
Content ideation, creation, and implementation is rarely if ever a
one-man show. Without structural guidance companies can fall into
content paralysis.
Content governance defines the players, process, and technical requirements necessary to produce and implement content.
Editorial Calendar
It's important to establish upfront what your ongoing content needs
are going to be. This ties into governance as well, as you must
understand your forward-looking content resources and plans. The
editorial calendar decides high-level subject matter and development
frequency of content you will create going forward for your blog,
resource center, and social channels. Lightbox Collaborative has created
an excellent editorial calendar that also includes governance features.
Measurement
Establish the key performance indicators associated with the
relaunch. These should generally include visitor behavior, organic
rankings, and social interaction. Ensure you establish a system to
monitor and report on these factors.
Technology Foundation
You're going to have to make some decisions regarding technology
platforms, and you'll have to do it upfront. Every website is different,
but most include the following common needs.
CMS and Blog Platform
Larger corporate sites may require a highly sophisticated platform
like Open Text or IBM Websphere, but most websites can get away with a
customized version of WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal. We chose WordPress
for its ease of use and customization, and impressive library of open
source content management, social, and SEO plugins.
Staging Server
This almost goes without saying, but you need to make sure you have a
fast staging server to experiment with your website throughout it's
development.
Just make sure the staging domain cannot be indexed by search engines!
Wireframe Tool
Before you map out screens in Photoshop, or dare start laying out
screen in html you should wireframe every major page in advance.
Balsamiq is a great option.
CSS & JS Libraries
The days of creating a calendar from scratch in JavaScript are over.
Make sure your usability designer is highly adept with new and supported
JS and CSS libraries. This will make sliders, modals, parallaxing,
dynamic charts, and other tools a reality within your reach. You should
definitely look into
JQuery and
Bootstrap.
Website Build Management
Integrating and managing all aspects of the redesign is a huge task,
and once your site launches you should encourage your company to solicit
feedback.
Trello is great for task and feedback management. You might consider Basecamp or others as well.
Content Development
Content development is not just writing copy – it's also content
management, SEO, and social integration. The following steps should help
get you through it.
Create a Content Plan
Before you flush your old site down the tubes you must first take an
inventory of every page. At minimum, you'll need to catalog by ID, URL,
title, type (web page, PDF, video, etc.), relevance (will it make the
transition?), state (whether it works in current form or needs update),
and notes. We wrote a detailed post about how to perform a
content audit and establish an inventory (you can
download our template here).
The pages that make the cut need to be mapped with keywords,
personas, and need states. Advanced SEO professionals will generally
perform exhaustive keyword analysis, and that will lead to the
recommendation of new pages, which also need to be included in the
content plan.
Develop an SEO Copy Brief
If you have multiple copywriters contributing to the website you
might consider developing an instructional how-to guide for creating and
optimizing content for your website.
Wireframe the Website
This seems like a big extra step, but this process will allow you to
get internal buy-in for important things like layout, features, and
calls-to-action. This actually really speeds up the process by cutting
down on back and forth page changes.
A company's executive team should sit with the lead designer to go
through call-to-action formats, header formats, and all of the other
minutiae that can affect user experience, conversion performance, and
search rankings. Time spent looking at competition and other
categorically relevant sites is time well spent for all. The group
feedback can be quickly integrated into the wireframes for review.
Source, Polish, and Optimize Content
Once you've determined what content will be created on the new
website you may need to incorporate internal champions to help to
develop the first round of copy. After you've collected everyone's
feedback you can synchronize the brand voice and tone. We recently
published a mini-case study about
how we wrote the content, and it has some solid pointers for any content strategist or copywriter.
Don't forget to reference the content plan when you optimize the site
for search engines. You need to incorporate keywords in the site copy
and meta tags.
Oh, and don't think for a second that meta tags means title and meta description. That's 2009 thinking. There are
18 meta tags you should be taking seriously for every page. But, this post isn't a lesson in SEO.
Creative for the Win
This section deserves it's own post, but there are a few things to point out.
Create a Brand Style Guide
The brand style guide establishes your brand colors, logo treatments, fonts, document margins, and spacing styles.
Example Primary Colors.
Example Secondary Colors – iAcquire's designer threw in "darkerer" as a shade for a little comic relief.
Make Every Page Remarkable
Ultimately, there are a number of ways you can design your website,
and you have to go through the discovery process as referenced in the
wireframe. Regardless of the choices you make, if you really want to
make an impact then you need to create
remarkable content and creative.
Spend time making sure that
every page on your website has at least some element of shareable, stand-out content/creative.
Our home page has a live feed of our Instagram account, YouTube
channel, and a Twitter list feed. We even created an entire microsite
called
iAcquire Tweets to capture a unique mix of mentions, and brand fans.
Our industries page features a trailing 30-day view of SERP movement among major industries thanks to some very clever JS, and
Stat Codex for providing the data. Our
Work page
features a comprehensive timeline with images and video to boot. We
spent time making sure that every page was remarkable. It took a long
time, but the investment was well worth it.
Pre-Launch
As you put the finishing touches on your new site consider these final things:
- Setup 301 Redirects: People miss this time and time
again. To keep it simple, Google has an index of all of your current
pages. When you launch a new website those old pages might not have the
same URLs as the new pages do. If you wipe out your old pages then you
wipe out Google's current index of your site. That's a bad thing to do.
It can really hurt your rankings. If any of your URLs are going to
change with your new site launch you must have a proper 301 redirect
strategy in place before your launch.
- Don't Forget About Analytics Code: Here's another
website launch fail. When you launch your new site don't forget about
your analytics codes. I've seen websites forget about this for even a
short period of time like one week, and it plagues marketers for the
following 12-24 months. Any hole in tracking data is extremely
detrimental.
- Perform Quality Control: Invite multiple people to
tear through the staging domain and provide unbridled feedback. Filter
through it accordingly, and obviously you need a final editor to review
all copy before you launch.
- Prepare Influencer Outreach: Use a great tool like Followerwonk to pre-determine who you want to review your site upon launch. You may even consider sharing the staging URL to a select few.
Summary
We followed the process above, and are excited that our new site
reflects our full-range of capabilities and updated brand identity.
Hopefully this post has given you some great ideas on how you can
successfully launch a new website that also refreshes your brand.
My team and I are standing by to answer any questions you may have
about your own relaunch, or anything related to iAcquire's new site.
Let's talk.
Reference :- http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2264593/How-to-Successfully-Launch-a-New-Website-Refresh-Your-Brand
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