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Sign of the Times: Considering the Best Time to Redesign Your Website

Posted on by Mario

Sign of the Times_ When Should You Redesign Your Website

It’s immensely hard to keep up with the rapid pace of development in technology. Moore’s law, the assertion made in the 70’s form Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors inside an integrated circuit would double every two years, has been proven true in the last 4 decades or so, with Intel themselves finally putting the brakes just a couple years ago. In layman’s terms, Moore’s law states that technology advances at an exponential rate, instead of going 1-2-3-4-5; it goes 1-2-4-8-16.

Here’s an illustration. Say a 20-year old college kid from 2018 is transported back to the 1998. See how well he could cope with a 56k dial-up connection, no WhatsApp, no Maps and music that only came in discs. Now take a 20-year old college kid from 1998 and transport him back to 1978 and see how he’d do. Sure, adapting to DOS instead of Windows might take some time but all-in-all; I’m willing to bet he’s coping much better compared to the one from 2018.

Moore’s law from the perspective of web development

In the world of web development, which hadn’t even properly existed 2 decades ago, the rate of progress is just as rapid. First, we’ve got simple static webpages, then as functionality get added into the web, the term web application entered our vernacular. Palm and other personal digital assistants included a native web browser in their repertoire but it wasn’t until iPhone 3G came out with Safari on board that mobile web browsing was finally considered seriously.

In the last few years, we’ve had responsive web design and progressive web apps emerging as more proof in how the mobile web experience has emerged as the primary platform. Even though the world hasn’t fully adapted to this trend yet, our tech overlords have begun implementing VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) into the web with the goal of further enhancing the mobile web experience. This begs the question, just how often companies have to redesign their website to keep up with this?

To update or to redesign?

What’s broken can always be fixed, but what’s fixed will always be broken. Very zen-like isn’t it? What this means is that even though you can update your website as often as you would to keep up with the latest development, at some point you’re going to have to pull the plug and start over from scratch. Some changes are so fundamental that it’s more efficient to head back to the drawing board instead of adding more things to your current website.

The problem is, knowing precisely when to redesign your website is somewhat of a puzzle. Website redesign takes an incredible amount of work and even if you have the best of intentions, it is rarely, if ever, taken well by the users. It can be slightly disheartening to see that your meticulously planned redesign is responded with a Change.org petition from your users asking you to reconsider your design.

Times you have to consider a redesign

While the word redesign itself implies an aesthetic rework, a web redesign isn’t exclusively about looks. Google for example still uses the same basic aesthetics they’ve used in the last 15 years or so but the results page have gone through a lot of changes, additions and other improvements compared to the one I used for homework in middle school. In fact, there are other times that signify when you should redesign your website, as detailed below:

  • Due to technological progress

Some technological advancement is mainstream enough for the public to recognize. Some, while bringing much-needed improvements into how website works, are strictly limited to lines of codes. VR and AR are examples of the former while things relating to Javascript, like React and Node, are examples of the former.

Just because they’re not immediately visible to the naked eye though, doesn’t mean they don’t warrant a redesign. The under-the-hood improvements they bring are usually useful enough to at least consider a redesign.

  • Your website pales in comparison to your competitor’s

Either aesthetically or functionally, if one or more of your competitors’ website has started to outshine your website, that’s your cue to start considering a redesign. If you’re not in the habit of checking your competitor’s website, then you might want to start now. I’ve heard cases of businesses not taking seriously the importance of checking your competition before it’s too late.

For an actual case study, look at what happened to car manufacturers in America. They haven’t paid much attention to Tesla in the early years and now Tesla’s network of electrical charging station, the aptly-named Supercharger, is the envy of the industry. Website redesign takes time so the cost of not realizing just how far ahead your competitors are in front of you is going to get amplified.

  • Due to increasingly critical feedback from users

If you’re not receiving any feedback at all, have the non-technical member of your team/company or anyone else you know who’s not as technologically savvy to test your website and act as some sort of a beta tester. It is important you hear some feedback from someone who isn’t part of the industry as they are a rough representative of the typical user.

  • Your website stops working properly

This is pretty obvious but if your website starts showing broken image icons instead of the actual images, then it’s time to consider a redesign. That’s the downside of constantly updating your website, the underlining code would just get stressed to a point that it would start to slow down and eventually stops working properly.

  • Your business has experienced some recent growth and/or changes

Case in point, Netflix. Netflix started in the late 90’s as a DVD rental business but then pivoted into a video streaming service back in 2007 and now regularly makes their own films and series on top of acquired programming. Obviously, when you switched from mailing DVDs out to your customer to a YouTube-like service, your website is going to need rebuilding from the ground up, which they duly did.

One last thing to note, a website redesign has to be properly planned. Even after the design and development process is done, do not implement this right away, publish it locally first and have your team works out all the kinks before going publicly live. Take note of the case of Microsoft and their problematic Windows updates. One of their recent updates apparently bricked some customer’s PC, forcing users to rollback to previous version of Windows.

5 Mistakes Many Smart People Keep Making in SEO

Posted on by Mario

5 SEO Mistakes many Smart People Keep Making_YWF-01

Before starting this article, I would like to remind you that everyone makes mistakes, so whether you have been in this industry for years or a new player, you will likely make mistakes and the only way to minimalize the mistakes is to learn about your mistakes. There will be many SEO mistakes to talk about, but primarily, we want to share some of them with you, so that you can identify and avoid them and then hopefully, it can gain you success faster and more efficiently. If you are a business owner, don’t forget to share this knowledge to your SEO services agency too.

  1. Serving Bots Before Humans

If your SEO efforts are still all about chasing algorithms, or trying to trick search engines, you’d better leave it all behind, since now what it takes to rank well today is exactly the same as what it takes to satisfy visitors.

Unfortunately, many people still think about putting bots above actual humans which can result in ineffective tactics like keyword stuffing, specific content length, and manipulative linking schemes. I understand that this kind of thinking works in the olden days, but in today’s SEO environment, you really need to change your paradigm.

This is because the main priority in SEO is to always focus on your human visitors, since they are the people that will buy and use your products or services. For example, the main idea of creating a mobile-friendly website is to satisfy mobile users with lots of useful, original, and well-written content that can load quickly.

  1. Thinking about Tactics Instead of Strategies

Many people still mislead between tactics and strategies. In fact, this confusion has become a big problem which causes people to be inefficient and aimless. Therefore, it is important to achieve significant long-term success by having a clear understanding of the difference between the two; here are the simple ways to differentiate them:

  • Strategy: A big picture objective that will give you a significant competitive advantage.
  • Tactics: The actions you have to take to achieve that strategy.

For example, when you want to sell things online, you will use social media selling as your strategy, but providing lots of content per day to make people aware of your products is the tactic.

  1. Failing to Accurately Track Performance

It is important to know exactly how you’re performing, so that you can see whether you’re making sufficient progress or not. Furthermore, instead of relying on your gut instinct, you can try to track your performance through so many powerful tools available that can range from Google Analytics and Search Console to paid tools like Raven, SEMrush, and Moz.

With those tools, you can increase what is working and fix or eliminate what isn’t working well in your campaigns. Besides, you can detect any problem early and it will also allow you to correct it early.

  1. Taking Advice from Questionable Sources

With internet, you can easily find a lot of information, but you need to be careful as information that you get from the internet may have been out-dated, or they can be hoax too. On the other hand, SEO has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. This surely makes it is easy for you to find information that is flat-out false. Therefore, you need to stay on top of SEO by reading the top publication from the trustworthy sources. Furthermore, since SEO is a constantly and rapidly evolving industry, you need to keep learning from many reputable sources.

  1. Not identifying Worthwhile Key Performance Indicators

In SEO, there are many things that you can use as your key performance indicator. However, not all things can be used as a good KPI; it depends on the context. For example, if you determine the number of new links on your website as a KPI, then you will call it a win if there are a lot of links coming from one website, and this is not true, as the links can also come from comment spam.

Therefore, your KPI must be objectively measurable and tied to a specific business goal, such as getting in front of ideal prospects, generating positive PR, or generating revenue, such as a link within content that’s relevant to what you do.

By knowing the 5 mistakes that even smartest people often do, you can prevent yourself from doing the same mistakes. Hopefully, after performing good SEO strategies, you can easily run a good SEO performance for growing and improving your business.

SEO Ranking Factors & Correlation: When a Metric is correlated with Google Rankings

Posted on by Mario

SEORankingFactors&Correlation---What-Does-It-Mean-When-a-Metric-Is-Correlated-with-Google-Rankings_ywf

In this opportunity we are going to talk about SEO ranking factors and correlation. In the other words, we want to see how correlation can impact on SEO factors. If you have likely seen, over the course of your career in the SEO services, you will see how much SEO works with correlation stuff and how many companies put these out. Actually there are also so many myths about correlation, but aside from that let’s figure out a few smart ways to use and understand the data at hand.

What is correlation good for?

So, what’s correlation actually good for? We know a bunch of myths, but actually that do not work. So, here are some things that correlation is good for.

1. IDing the elements that more successful pages tend to have

When you look across a correlation, you will find lots of pages are twice as likely to have X and rank highly as the ones that don’t rank highly which you can use this finding as a good piece of data.

2. Watching elements over time to see if they rise or lower in correlation

it is important to keep your eyes on links to see if they raise or lower, and then we can say:”Oh, does it look like links are getting more or less influential in Google’s rankings? Are they more or less correlated than they were last year or two years ago?” If the links drop dramatically, you may test the power of links again and it’s the time for you to try another experiment. Then, see if links still move the needle or if they’re becoming less powerful or if it’s merely because the correlation is dropping.”

3. Comparing Sets of search results against one another we can identify unique attributes that might be true

The example above shows that in a vertical like news, we find that domain authority is much more important than it is in fitness; this is where smaller sites potentially have much more opportunity or dominate. Other thing that we can figure out is that https is not too suitable to stand out in news since everybody has it. On the other hand, it works well in fitness as it produces a more stand out result and people who do have it will do it much better or maybe they also invest more in their sites.

4. Judging Metrics as a Predictive Ranking Ability

One question may come up to your mind when you’re looking at a metric like domain authority, such as how good is that at telling me on average how much better one domain will rank in Google versus another? In fact, you can see the number is a good indication of that. When the number goes down, then domain authority is less predictive less sort of useful for me. Conversely, it will be more useful if it goes up. A study is conducted to look at traffic metrics with Alexa Rank and SimilarWeb and which ones are best correlated with actual traffic. The result shows that Alexa Rank is awful while SimilarWeb is better.

5. Finding Elements to Test

You will be amazed to see large images embedded on a page that’s already ranking on page 1 of search results in the first few. This is why we need correlation, especially in SEO when it comes to ranking factors or ranking elements might be misleading.

So, now that you know the area that correlation is good for. However, you still need to be careful as correlation in SEO can be very misleading, especially when it comes to ranking factors or ranking elements. After all, with this explanation, hopefully you can understand how to use and not to use that data.