Redesign and promotion. Chicken and Egg Challenge

It will be a question of "reworking existing sites from scratch", because executives of companies whose resources are not the first, somewhere in their head they keep thinking about the next progress, and try to take this into account in the process of redesign.

How it all begins and how it ends?

Let's remember when the thought arises that the site needs to be urgently redone? When a new employee (manager) comes to the company with a burning eye and a desire to move mountains.

Arguments to remake a site are usually expressed not by common sense and numbers, but by emotions: “ugly”, “not modern”, “nobody already does that”. And not a word about those for whom it (the web resource) is intended.

The result is the same as it was, but in a different color, and sometimes even worse - with a new tail of errors and old materials that do not fit into the new design.
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In most cases, ideas for the new site are not even transferred to paper and are “generated” at a meeting in the studio, because professionals from the web-studio know by 200% what exactly needs to be done and should catch everything “on the fly” for conditional XX XX rubles . They know, but their part of the work, because Only business owners understand who their customers are and what information they need first. If someone thinks for you, it will be entirely for other money.

Another common option: copy me the site of my competitors, but in another "cover."

It is necessary to understand that the creation of any product is, first of all, a thought process, as a result of which something is completed. And without understanding why everything is done this way, the product is likened to a “Chinese” who looks like the original, but does not work at all and breaks down at the most inconvenient moment.

That is, in most cases, the site is upgraded on emotions. In fact, there are only two significant reasons for rework:

• The site completely distorts the real image of the company, because at the time of its creation, the enterprise was completely different. And we are not talking about beauty or modern technologies, but about the relevance and reliability of information. How many times have I come across the fact that a serious company with an excellent reputation presents itself on the Internet is just awful and does not hesitate to give links to your site in professional articles that look very worthy.
• The main task of the redesign “according to Darwin”, about which very few people think: it’s not the one who is prettier, more modern or smarter that survives, but the one who is able to adapt.

So, if your site is not adapted to satisfy the interests of visitors or gives false ideas about your enterprise, it dies. And behind him and the company close.

Therefore, we set aside for the time being brainstorming and creative flows. To begin, let's answer the question: how to understand the interests of customers in a rapidly changing world?

Explore interests

Conducting surveys of their clients is a very long process, and the information received is not always reliable. Not because they want to deceive you very much, but on the contrary - they are embarrassed to offend. In addition, it is not always clear how much information is enough to satisfy the interest of the buyer.

Therefore, it is better to use soulless search query statistics services for analysis:

• Google: http://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner
• Yandex: https://wordstat.yandex.ru/

Despite the fact that such a great variety of tools, these two will be quite enough to solve our problems.

To study was deep, you need to make a complete list of phrases that describe your business scope.

For example, let's take an analytics for one of my clients, who produces glued timber at home.

The list for entering search queries into the service line may look like this:

• houses from glued timber
• baths of laminated veneer lumber
• production of glued timber
• etc.

But for a detailed analysis, I decided to study the whole niche and conducted research on all the phrases that relate to laminated veneer lumber.


* The number of impressions per month for the phrase “glued laminated timber” is the sum of the results of the issuance of the results for all the phrases containing this phrase, i.e. and "glued timber price" and "glued timber turnkey" and all the rest.

When analyzing a niche, you can identify individual phrases and words that are of primary interest to search engine users. In our example it is “price”, “turnkey”, “projects”.

It would be useful to pay attention to the right column. These are phrases that were entered by users who searched for information on glued laminated timber.

Based on these "markers" you can create a structure of sections of your site. There is one important point. The amount of material you assign to a particular topic should depend on the popularity of the search query.

For example, for projects of houses it is possible to distinguish a whole section with dozens of options for buildings, for reviews there are several pages, and for the list of pros and cons, mentioning on one of the site’s pages is enough:



It happens that there are interesting phrases that no one would have thought of himself.

For example:

• for this project, we found a small demand for hotels and villages of laminated veneer lumber and decided to create for them a separate section on the site.
• The site for each project shows the area, but statistics show that people indicate the perimeter when searching (6? 9 m, 10? 15 m, etc.) based on the size of their site and this is more important for them.

Sample finished structure

As a result, we have such a site structure (we supplemented the analytics of search phrases with information about the company):

Left menu

• Houses
• Hotels and chalets
• Baths
• Summer houses
• Pergolas and grill houses
• Special offers
• Built houses
• Stairs and windows

Top Menu

• Prices
• Contents of delivery
• Production (+ and production gallery)
• Building
• Reviews
• About laminated veneer lumber (articles)
• About Us
• Contacts

After the structure is ready, you need to prepare the materials that you plan to place in them. Otherwise, the study will be useless, and most of your pages will remain “at the filling stage”.

Remember that with ready-made materials it will be easier for you and developers, and especially designers, who are often forced to insert on the pages of “lorem ipsum” instead of real texts and photos. This leads to the fact that after filling in the prepared layouts with your information, the design falls apart into pieces.

What else can be obtained from statistics

Regional popularity. It is no secret that in different cities of Russia the demand for this or that information varies. In general, in all regions, Yandex takes the phrase popularity for 100%. If in any region the demand is higher, respectively, and the percentage is higher.

How can this be used? For example, in those cases when you decide in which cities you need to open representative offices or more aggressively advertise.


Seasonality. This data can be used to determine the launch date of a new site or the start of an advertising campaign (on the date of the demand break point from minimum to maximum).


Now you can go to the web studio with arguments and statistics on hand.

Preparing for the visit to the studio

I advise you to take with you:

• Ready site structure
• Navigation offer
• Sketches for each page of your site (at least in pencil on sheets of paper)
• Ready text and graphic materials

All this will allow you to communicate with the developers in their language and greatly simplify teamwork.

PS What does the progress and challenge about the chicken and the egg?

Everything is very simple. Having completed all the recommendations, you will, before receiving the finished website, somehow begin to promote your company on the Internet. Therefore, the task of the egg and the chicken will be solved by itself.

Such analytics takes 3-4 hours and does not require special knowledge. The experience of successful projects implemented shows that the implementation of this simple analysis saves up to 6 months of time for launching the site and the same amount for its effective promotion + reduces costs for everything at least 2 times.