How to plan a website to maximize SEO success

Many redesigned websites fail to improve SEO, often damaging existing rankings and creating challenges for SEO teams trying to recover lost traffic. This can severely affect business visibility, lead generation and sales.

I have been handed many a brand new website and asked to “SEO it” when untold damage has been done and significant time and effort must be spent just to get traffic levels back where they were before the redesign. 

Many articles help with website SEO and how to retain SEO traffic during a redesign. There are also helpful books and frameworks for website planning.

Yet, seemingly no resource combines a sensible approach to planning a new site with the retention and improvement of SEO. 

This article will outline how to plan a new website effectively to retain existing traffic and create a platform to improve your SEO. 

To make following along easier, you can fill out the steps in the template below:

Website planning and SEO 

To ensure your new website retains and improves your SEO, it is helpful to ensure you have a clearly defined SEO strategy and you have articulated this in a simple SEO plan. 

The worst thing in any website design project is when unexpected problems or changes arrive during development. 

A well-developed plan that has input from all stakeholders helps ensure less of this. More importantly, if the customer changes their mind or the scope creeps (the scope always creeps), you have the document to show the original scope and justify the necessary fee increases. 

I wish I had a dollar for every time we were asked to review a new site that was almost finished – only to find that SEO hadn’t been considered, putting its success at risk.

We recently worked on a six-figure project for a business that thrived on organic traffic. The project would essentially destroy all the hard-earned SEO. 

This took several months and probably another six figures in PPC spend (to replace what was free SEO traffic from an SEO vs. PPC perspective), as well as further SEO time and redevelopment. You want to avoid that if at all possible. 

We have also seen other sites that had so comprehensively damaged SEO traffic that the only sensible approach was to roll back to the previous site. 

Suffice it to say that ensuring you retain SEO traffic and set the scene for improvements is not something you can leave to chance. 

The approach laid out here combines a fairly standard approach to website planning, which, done well, will save much time, money and pain, with the kind of jobs needed to retain existing SEO traffic while building a furtive platform for further SEO development. 

The output of this process should be a document that either acts as the foundation of the website brief or is integrated into a traditional brief. 

Note: Where the SEO brief and website brief are separate entities, I always recommend reviewing the final website brief to ensure the SEO brief has been incorporated before the project kicks off. 

There are five key steps to work through to create your SEO-friendly website blueprint:

1. Existing rankings and traffic 

Your must understand your traffic and where it comes from.

To do this, spend some time in Google Analytics and Google Search Console to identify:

• High-ranking keywords.
• High-traffic keywords.
• High-traffic content.
• High-opportunity pages.
• High-opportunity keywords.

Your goal is to clearly document what works currently. These must be included in the new site.

If high-traffic content is removed, not correctly optimized, or lost in the new site’s hierarchy, then you are inviting problems. 

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a treasure trove of SEO information and will give you the straight dope on your rankings and traffic. 

Here, you’ll see high-opportunity keywords and pages with lots of impressions but not many clicks. 

• Visit Search Console
• Performance > Search Results

The main information you are looking for is in the queries and pages tabs. You can order this by clicks (traffic) and impressions (which is an opportunity). 

Work through this information and document your findings in the template. 

Crawl data

Crawl your website and save a copy of the crawl (Screaming Frog is a cost-effective or free way of doing this under 500 pages).

This will allow you to check links to the page and compare with the new site if (and when) problems arise. 

SEO tools

You can also use any SEO tools for rank tracking. 

Still, I prefer Search Console and Google Analytics for this as they give you real data and insight, not the extrapolated data the typical SEO tools provide, which can often be wildly inaccurate and misleading. 

Dig deeper: Website redesign SEO checklist: Retaining and improving SEO

2. SEO and website goals 

Goals are crucial to any project. Starting with clear goals helps you understand your destination, making it easier to find the right path forward.

Goals provide you with a tool for assessing all decisions throughout the project.

Will doing something help us hit our goals? If not, don’t do it. If so, go for it! 

You may have goals for the website project overall, ideally these will be hierarchical. For instance, we may have one super goal that states the goal of the new website is to generate more leads. 

You may then have sub-goals such as to improve SEO and improve conversion rates that work in service of the master goal. 

Remember to make your SEO goals specific and measurable, so SMART goals are helpful here. 

Overall, you may need a hierarchy of goals here that covers:

• Website Goal: Generate more leads/sales.
• SEO Goal 1: Rank our service pages more highly.
• SEO Goal 2: Rank our upper funnel marketing content highly. 

You may also find it useful to look at things you want to avoid with the new site. Determining what you are aiming at and what you are running away from can be just as helpful, if not more so. 

• Anti-goal: Avoid having a site that is essentially no different from our competitors. 

Document your goals in the website plan template and move on. 

3. Audience and customer segments

Carefully define your target audience(s) along with some considerations regarding your competitors. 

Remember, in marketing, targeting everyone is targeting no one. 

That is not to say you can’t target multiple audiences, but you do need to give some consideration to each audience and factor this into the structure and segmentation of your new site.

We want to carefully consider the goals, problems and jobs of our target audience to ensure our business goals, website goals and the goals of the people we serve are all finely aligned. 

Audience questions

We want to start by simply identifying the different audiences: men, women, students, Gen X, Millennials, etc. 

For each audience:

• Audience name.
• Demographics (age, sex, location).
• What is the problem or goal of the target audience?
• Where do they hang out or find information online?

The information you gather here will help you when it comes to structuring your site to support the individual needs of each audience (which, in turn, makes optimizing for each audience so much easier). 

To explore each customer segment in more depth, you can use the SEO Value Proposition Template and SCAMPER to understand your customers and identify the content you need to hit your goals. 

Remember that Google wants you to focus on creating helpful, people-first content. To do this, you need to understand your people (audience) and ensure you are writing for them. 

This process feeds into your SEO like no other, so spend the time getting into the minds of your audience segments. Your SEO will thank you for it.  

Note all of this down in the website plan template and move on. 

4. Structure and sitemap

A sitemap provides a simple overview of the new site and can be cross-referenced with the existing goals. 

For instance, the new sitemap should include high-traffic pages on the current site that drive business performance. 

Sitemaps help gather feedback from all stakeholders and facilitate difficult conversations during the planning stages. Addressing these issues early can prevent problems later on with delivery, timelines and budgets.

I am a big fan of the idea that you should really thrash things out at this point and good ideas get strengthened and remain, while bad ideas can die here – rather than in costly development. 

Creating your sitemap

You want to create a simple bullet point sitemap in the first instance.

• Home 
• About Us
• Category A
• Category B
• Resources
• Contact

I recommend writing this all down in a spreadsheet so you have clarity and numbering for all pages (which will be useful in the next steps).

You can use your favorite drawing tool to create your sitemap. Draw.io has a useful set of templates, including various maps, that you can use for site mapping (all of which are saved to Google Docs).

A visual sitemap can be useful for the major categories and sections of the site and can aid in getting feedback from stakeholders.  

The key takeaway here is that we want to create a sitemap that is segmented by our target audiences and serves the overarching marketing objectives. 

If our SEO goals are to retain traffic and create an optimized structure, then we can assess that here. 

Key pieces of content that have been identified should be recreated on the new site within an optimized structure that sets the scene for growth. 

Remember, the hierarchy here will inform you of your site’s folder structure, which helps provide context for each document. 

This, in turn, helps you structure your keywords from high-level broad keywords to more specific categories and longer-tail product/service keywords. The structure is key, so spend time here until you are happy. 

5. Page scoping

The next step of the planning process is to determine what content will be on each page.

Based on the level of detail you want to use here, you can either create columns in your spreadsheet sitemap that you created previously or go into more detail.

Typically, for each page, we should include:

• Goal of the page.
• Functionality / Features (e.g., forms).
• Content (images, text, video etc).
• SEO (Notes, Page Title, Meta Description).
• Notes.

The SEO aspect here is fairly obvious, and if we have a high-performing page currently, we want to ensure the main content is recreated. 

There is little point in adding a page and changing things radically – minimize the variables wherever possible. 

We want to examine the page’s goal and ensure that its functionality and content support it. 

Some example goals for pages are:

• Generate exposure from SEO (to feed remarketing).
• Generate leads.
• Funnel users to product pages. 

Work through each page detailing the goal for that page and then outline the content that supports that and update the website plan template. 

6. SEO specifics

The planning is important, but we must document a few SEO specifics to ensure this build aspect will be handled correctly.

• Keep the old site live on a temporary URL if possible.
• Create a list of redirections from the old pages to the new ones.
• Migrate content, page titles and meta descriptions for high-performing pages.
• Update external backlinks where possible.
• Monitor performance after launch (rankings, traffic, impressions).

Factoring in these five areas will ensure the main SEO points are covered.

6. Your website plan 

At this point, you should have a comprehensive but concise plan outlining what is needed on your new site. 

The plan should cover:

• Existing rankings and traffic.
• Goals for the project.
• Customer segments.
• Website structure and sitemap.
• Page scoping.
• SEO specifics (redirects, etc.).

Most people don’t do this. They create a super skinny brief and leave it to the web developers. 

But the web developers don’t know your business, so you have to put in the work to ensure the new site retains and improves your SEO (while also hitting the likely myriad of other goals that trickle down from management to marketing). 

While it may seem like an additional step, planning will save you time, money and pain while improving your overall results – a win-win. 

In a nutshell, you will get better results by doing the research and planning work. 

Launch and beyond

The final aspects to consider are the monitoring of the launch and what your marketing and SEO KPIs are to measure results. 

We always expect some turbulence, but keeping a close eye on the Search Console and your KPIs will help you spot issues and squash them quickly. 

SEO-friendly website planning to retain and improve traffic

Most websites could be better planned.

If you follow the simple steps here, you will have done more pre-design planning than 99% of other website projects, which can help you join the 1% of companies that get all the results.

Ensure you understand what works currently and where you want to go. Weave that into the planning for your new site and prepare to fly high.