Redesigning Your Website? Run Analytics First!
Writing by Brick Marketing in Internet Marketing
Is your website in need of an overhaul? Are you trying to make it more user-friendly, update the content or just plain make it better? Don’t break out the christening champagne too soon. Before you submit your final edits to your web designer for implementation, stop and ask yourself “Is my site fully optimized?” If you take the time to do it now, while you’re already dedicating the time and money to redesign, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble and headaches further down the road. 
Before you do anything to optimize your site—keyword research, Meta tag edits, URL structure, etc—you have to run analytics on your site! This can be easily done through Google Analytics, a free tool that you hopefully already use.
Take a look at the last six months of information. How many visitors are you averaging a month? What pages are they coming into your site through? What keywords drew them there? The reason you should run analytics before you begin dumping and rewriting content is because you don’t want to accidentally remove keywords that are actually helping your site in the search engine rankings.
Let’s say your website sells sports fan apparel. You run analytics on your site and find out that your football jersey page does the best and draws 300 unique visitors a month. Now let’s say 132 of those visitors came to your site by searching for “custom football jersey.” Only 12 arrived by searching for “personalized football jersey.” You don’t want to accidentally swap out all the “custom” keywords for “personalized,” hurting your chances at being found by interested searchers. Running analytics is the easiest way to make certain you don’t make that mistake.
The goal of on-site optimization is to enhance the pages that are doing well by adding supplemental keywords into the content. Your top two keywords should still be prominently featured in the URL, H1 tag and Meta description (although not to the point of keyword stuffing!) while two or three other keywords help broaden the page to appear different search keywords.
