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
maps. SEO provides pointers to your business on maps; rebuilding your website does not.
If you understand following statement, then 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 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 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 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 web each day, making search second most popular Internet activity next to checking email (81%) (DISC).
Studies have also proven that SEO has 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 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, results from SEO are very impressive. One of our long time clients in printing industry has been operating 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 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, site is still same except for some minor regular updates. In past, 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 case studies on 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 Internet. It is estimated that 56% of ALL websites are "lost in cyberspace"! What is 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.
