According to Orbit Media the average mid-size website goes through a redesign every 2 years and 7 months. 

Does that mean you must stick to that type of a schedule? 

No of course not, however, if it's been more than 5 years, or you see a decline in performance, you might consider a refresh. 

One of my staffing agency clients had a simple five page site.

They had a home page, an about page, a contact page and maybe one or two service type pages. 

This is NOT nearly enough content for your average job seeker or Google to figure out what you do, how you help your ideal clients or give them any reason to want to reach out to you for help. 

We started by mapping out a new navigation for them. This included a new place for a blog to appear, called a "knowledge center" and a number of new local pages geared to a few cities they were interested in targeting. 

We worked very closely with their development team to make sure all the SEO elements were applied throughout the course of the development process. 

• Including all unique title tags and meta descriptions
• Added Alternate Text to each image
• Included one H1 tag per page, formatting H2s, etc 
• Added at least 1 call to action per page
• Added 2-3 internal links (to help the new page get found, we also made sure to include links from primary pages like the home page and main services page) 
• Set up Google Search Console - easier to track any crawl related issues, overall performance
• Set up Google Analytics with Event tracking - This is KEY! You can't measure what you can't track - so we made sure to track all the incoming visitors path to what our client deemed to be a conversion, which was every time a visitor clicked on the "Search jobs" button on their site

This took approximately eight weeks from start to finish, and the results were nothing short of incredible.... 

How Do You Know If You're Site Needs a New Site Redesign? 

#1 Is Your Site Mobile Friendly?? 

Check to see if it conforms to mobile standards (can you resize it?) 

If you ever picked up your phone to look at your website and find yourself pinching squinting to access anything in your site - that’s a pretty good indication its not mobile responsive.

Maybe you hear your clients complain - “I can’t find you online!” or Do you offer XYZ?” Where is your business located?

Or any number of questions means your site is not very helpful to the very audience you should be helping.

#2 Your Website Is Not Optimized for Speed

Page speed is a mobile ranking factor and if you’re job seekers are struggling to wait for your site to load, then more than likely so is Google.

Test your site out by using either two of my fav tools - G page speed Insights or Lighthouse Chrome Extension, they will show you whether or not your site has any particular page loading issues, and how to resolve those. 

This one so often gets overlooked, but is just as important  - Is your site on some homegrown platform from 20 yrs ago that no one but 1 developer knows how to update?

If the platform is some kludgy piece of code your team can’t actually update it’s a good sign to start updating. The worst thing you can do for your future job seekers, is to have some outdated, useless website that does not have any regular, fresh new content appearing each week or month. 

#BACKEND JOBS DATABASE: Another overlooked aspect to the back end of your website is the jobs database connected to your website or are you using some third party jobs database like jobdiva?

NOTE: For any staffing agency using Job Diva right now, it's worth having a discussion about the pros and cons. I have discussed many cons specifically around using a third party platform disconnected from your site, one of which makes it very difficult to leverage Google's Job posting structured data on your site which would allow your postings to be displayed in the job search experience on Google, featuring your logo, reviews, ratings, and job details.

#4 Your Website Has a POOR USER EXPERIENCE

A good user experience, or UX, means it has great visual representation across any device.

Pick up your phone or tablet - now Check out your site - does it depict your brand in a professional way? How’s your IA? The "IA", or Information architecture means - your website visitors can easily navigate through your site acquiring the content they need in the right moment. 

We often review our client's sites during an annual technical analysis, and we do review their user experience and information architecture. There are many, not so obvious things, most website developers overlook when it comes to a site's user experience. 

Simple things like having at least one clear call to action on a page for a user to take. 

Once a visitor lands on a page, are they able to get the answers to their questions easily? Is there a natural next step for them to take once they've consumed that content? 

Or are they just not converting once they arrive to your site? Assuming, you have analytics tracking on your site, you can easily see where visitors 'get stuck' or drop off. 

If you find your business website encounters any of the above listed problem areas I've outlined, and you'd like to get a simple, no fee answer from an expert as to what you should change in your site, head over to my calendar and book a no fee strategy session. I'd love to chat about it with you and see how I can help you out.