Rebuild Website or Perform SEO?
Rebuild Website or Perform SEO... which should you do first? A
lot of website owners are interested in rebuilding their website
and in performing search engine optimization (SEO), but can't.
Budget constraints won't allow for both and so they struggle
with which one to do first. Rebuilding a website is a great
idea. Performing SEO is better.
The Internet is vast...truly vast. It is comprised of, at last
count, over 8-billion web pages and that number increases daily.
People need a map to chart this unimaginably large landscapes
and search engines are the maps. SEO provides pointers to your
business on the maps; rebuilding your website does not.
If you understand the following statement, then the decision is
very easy to make - in order to become visible to their second
audience (the visitors), websites must first receive adequate
top rankings (the first two pages of listing results) by their
first audience (the search engines).
Search engine optimization Search engine optimization is
probably the single most important marketing technique that a
website owner can do to increase visibility and visitors.
Greater visibility and highly targeted visitors improve sales,
which in turn, improves the bottom-line.
Numerous studies have proven just how important SEO is for
online businesses: -50% of those who bought from online retail
sites arrived via the search engines (Aggrandise.com, 2002).
-Between 85 and 90% of people use search engines to find
websites they've never visited before. -The Financial Times
reported August 2002, that every day over 340-million web users
rely on search engines to locate new businesses (DISC). -57% of
Internet users search the web each day, making search the second
most popular Internet activity next to checking email (81%)
(DISC).
Studies have also proven that SEO has the best return on
investment (ROI) of any form of advertising in terms of
cost-per-acquisition (CPA). Savvy website owners who realize
just how fierce competition on the Internet is use SEO to
position their business ahead of their competitors. If you are
not incorporating SEO as part of a website marketing/promotion
strategy you are losing out, because your competition mostly
likely is!
If done properly, the results from SEO are very impressive. One
of our long time clients in the printing industry has been
operating the same site for almost five years. Instead of
rebuilding their website which has a very simple design, they
decided to perform SEO. That same site now delivers so much
business that SEO is the only form of sales and marketing they
use (both online and offline). Another client now does as much
business in one day as it used to in seven. And this client
originally wanted to rebuild their site first. And to this day,
the site is still the same except for some minor regular
updates. In the past, the client did a lot of print advertising,
but because of great SEO results, they have cut their
advertising costs in half and achieved sales growth of 700%! For
more great examples, read the case studies on the Search Engine
Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) website.
Rebuilding a website Rebuilding a site makes it look nice,
provides fresh content, and sometimes improves navigation. Will
any of these lead to increased visitors? Most likely not. Making
aesthetic changes does very little to increase a website's
visibility on the Internet. It is estimated that 56% of ALL
websites are "lost in cyberspace"! What is the point of spending
money on rebuilding a site if no one ever sees it? It would be a
complete waste of time, money, and effort - all of which
translate into a very poor ROI.
Your website is competing with over 8-billion (at last count)
other pages on the Internet. It will be "lost" by not having it
visible to the search engines - akin to putting up a flashing
billboard on a deserted island! It can be the greatest billboard
ever designed, but because of its isolated location very few
people will see or read it, and thus, it will be a poor source
of revenue generation.
The fact is, there are lots of great websites on the Internet.
So what? What's the use of having a great website if no one
knows about it or can find it? And even if people do know about
it, you are still not reaching the largest Internet demographic:
the 85 to 90% of ALL Internet users who find what they are
looking for by conducting searches on search engines!
The top-4 search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL
(CyberAtlas, May 2003). How do they compare in terms of traffic?
The info below shows the top 5 results of the Top-50 Internet
Property Rankings for October 2003 (ComScore Media Metrix, Nov.
2003). Keep in mind that the table shows total number of unique
visitors, not total number of searches. So while MSN is tops in
terms of traffic, Google is still the king of search. Rank
Property Unique Visitors (in thousands) 1 MSN-Microsoft sites
109,334 2 Yahoo! sites 108,673 3 AOL Time Warner Network 108,394
4 eBay 62,454 5 Google sites 58,209
The point of the table is that four out of the top five
most-visited sites are search related sites. SEO is your
mechanism for becoming visible to this group. SEO is critical to
the success of your online venture. Rebuilding is also
important, but it can wait.
Other considerations -Ask yourself, what will deliver more
results to my business: rebuilding or SEO? -What is the purpose
of your site? If you use it to bring in customers or sell
products, then SEO is definitely the one to do first. If
visitors and sales aren't important, but having a beautiful,
stylish site is, then by all means rebuild it. -To deliver
maximum benefits your website has to be both people and search
engine friendly. Will rebuilding accomplish this? -Some owners
think they'll rebuild the site first and then perform SEO, only
to discover afterwards that their budgets won't allow for it.
Ask yourself, do I want to be stuck with a nice looking site
that delivers NO more traffic than its predecessor? -Your
website should be an asset, not an expense. It should be
generating you income or leads, or providing useful information
about your company. If it isn't then why have it? -In the US,
13% of traffic to a website comes from search engines, up from
8% for the previous year. International figures were even more
striking with some countries having search engine referral rates
as high as 21%! (WebSideStory, Mar. 2003). SEO makes your site
search engine friendly. Rebuilding it may or may not, depending
on how skilled in SEO your webmaster is. There's far, far more
to SEO than just inserting META tags (title, description,
keyword tag).
SEO first, rebuild second It really is a much wiser choice to
perform SEO first. Later if the results indicate the need to
make improvements, then proceed with rebuilding your website.
Involve your SEO in the rebuilding process - their input/ advice
will be invaluable!
