What a redesign should change for search, AI answers and enquiries

Many redesign briefs for industrial websites are written about appearance: a modern look, better photographs, a new colour scheme, a mobile-friendly layout. Those are reasonable wants, and none of them says what the site should do better afterwards. A redesign that changes the look and leaves the outcomes to chance can cost search traffic, leave AI assistants describing the company from outdated sources, and produce the same number of enquiries as before.

A better brief names three goals: search, AI answers and enquiries, usually shortened to SEO, AEO and CRO. Each one shows up in specific lines of the brief and specific checks in the build. This guide sets them out for a manufacturer or industrial supplier. For the switchover itself, see the website relaunch runbook and the relaunch day checklist.

How the three goals show up in the brief and the build

Each goal needs a line in the brief that states it in checkable terms, and a check in the build that proves it was met.

SEO: what the redesign has to protect and improve

For search, a redesign first has to protect what the old site already earns, then improve on it. Protection comes from content parity and a URL plan; improvement comes from internal links and speed.

Content parity

Write into the brief that every page in the top fifty by organic landings keeps the information that earned its traffic. On an industrial site that usually means the specification tables, the grades and standards listed, the applications and industries named, and enough descriptive text for a search engine to understand what the page is about. Design can change everything around those facts. It should not remove them, shorten them into a slider, or move them into a downloadable PDF only.

A URL plan

Decide early whether URLs change. Keeping them, where they are reasonable, is the lowest risk option. If they change, write into the brief that the build follows Google's site move documentation on redirects, canonicals and internal links; the website relaunch runbook turns those rules into dated steps. Google also advises planning changes one after the other rather than all at once, so avoid combining a URL change with a domain change unless there is a strong reason.

Internal links

A redesign is the cheapest moment to fix internal linking. Write into the brief that every product page links to its product family page, to related products and grades, to the approvals page and to the quote form, and that every product family page links to all its products in plain HTML links. Mega menus built in JavaScript and products reachable only through a site search are common ways new designs hide pages from crawlers.

Speed

Set a measurable speed target in the brief rather than asking for a fast site. web.dev, Google's performance guidance site, says sites should aim for a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads and segmented across mobile and desktop. Large hero images and sliders on the homepage and on product pages are the usual cause of a miss on industrial sites.

AEO: what the redesign has to do for AI answers

For AI answers, the redesign has to make the company's facts readable in page text and its identity consistent everywhere. Most of this overlaps with search, and Google says so directly.

Google's guide to optimising for generative AI features in Search states that, from Google Search's perspective, optimising for generative AI search is optimising for the search experience, and so still SEO. It says structured data is not required for these features and that there is no special schema.org markup to add, that a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet, and that new machine-readable files or AI text files are not needed. For a redesign brief this removes a set of distractions and puts the weight back on what pages say and whether they can be indexed.

Facts in text

Write into the brief that the facts buyers and assistants look for appear as HTML text: what the company makes, to which standards, with which approvals, from which location, at what capacity, for which industries and countries. Facts that exist only in images, infographics, embedded video or a PDF catalogue are harder for any system to read and quote. SEOtop10's guide to what an industrial product page needs covers the page-level detail.

Entity consistency

Choose one form of the company name and use it identically on the site, in the Business Profile, on LinkedIn, in directory listings and in the markup. A company that appears as "Private Limited" in one place, "Pvt. Ltd." in another and by its brand name in a third gives every system reading it a small puzzle to solve. The redesign is a good moment to settle the form and correct the listings you control.

Organization markup

Put Organization markup on the home page with the name, website, logo, address, telephone and sameAs links to the profiles that are definitively the company. The launch-day setup in launching a new website for a manufacturing company covers it with Google's guidance. It is not required for AI features, as Google's guide notes, but it states the company's identity in a form machines read without inference. Assistants outside Google depend on their own crawlers being allowed in, which crawler access, schema and entities covers.

CRO: what the redesign has to do for enquiries

For enquiries, the redesign has to shorten the distance between a buyer reading a product and asking for a quote. Four things in the brief do most of the work.

• A quote route on every product page. A visible button that opens a form with the product name already filled in, so sales knows what the buyer was reading. A contact page reached only from the main menu is a longer route than most buyers will take.
• Short forms. Name, company, email or phone, product, quantity and a message. Each further field needs a commercial reason. Make sure the form works on a phone, with fields large enough to tap.
• Proof near the decision. Approvals, certifications and industries served shown on the product page itself, as text, rather than only on a separate page. Named customers only where permission exists.
• A reply time. Agree inside the company how fast an enquiry gets a reply, and put the routing in the build: which inbox, who is copied, and what happens out of hours.

Checking the build before sign-off

Check the staging build against the brief line by line before approving it, and record each check as passed or failed. Design approval and outcome approval are different sign-offs and should be given separately.

1. Compare the top fifty pages old against new for specifications, headings and text.
2. Run the redirect map against staging and confirm every old URL reaches its new page in one hop.
3. View product pages with styles and scripts off and confirm the specification tables are still there.
4. Measure the homepage and two product pages for Largest Contentful Paint on a mobile profile.
5. Confirm Organization markup is on the home page and the company name matches the Business Profile.
6. Submit a test enquiry from three product pages on a phone and confirm the product name arrives.

A month after launch, repeat the AI visibility baseline described in a website relaunch is a launch, or run the full twelve prompt test, and compare with the readings taken before the switch. For the wider design and build side of a website project, EbizIndia's website design and redesign service page describes how such projects are scoped.