Does your content accurately reflect your latest products and services to engage your audience? Can your customers easily find what they need? Are your competitors ranking ahead of you in a Google search?
Many small and medium sized businesses and organisations miss out on valuable leads and brand positioning opportunities as their websites, their virtual shop windows, are neglected due to lack of time or resource.
Here’s our Top 5 Ways To Invigorate A Neglected Website
1. Think Customer first!
Your website should not be a flat online catalogue of your products and services but an opportunity to deliver the latest relevant information, regularly and of value to your customers. Anticipate what your audience need and expect from your product or service and ensure that your content resonates. Maybe it’s more frequent product or service updates, tips reflecting FAQs, insightful customer case studies or a topical blog. Don’t be limited to text either. Mix up the formats to appeal to all learning styles - infographics, images, videos and podcasts can all convey and reinforce your relevant messaging while being easily shareable.
Result: your customers will feel understood and be more likely to revisit your site and share with others.
2. Make it easy to do business with you
How do your customers prefer to interact with your business? Ensure that contact details reflect this, and are easy to find on your site. Include clear and concise 'calls to action' on each page or section so your customers know what to do next.
Result: the customer journey is clear and intuitive making it easy for your audience to engage with your organisation.
3. Optimise your website for Search Engines
Google and other search engines are dedicated to optimising every website visitor’s experience. Websites ‘optimised’ for customer experiences are rewarded with higher rankings in search engine result pages. For businesses to comply, their websites must be fast to load; have frequently updated, relevant and valued content; have user friendly navigation and an intuitive structure, and be 100% responsive to the users device.
There are many steps to achieving website optimisation, with some being more technical than others but plenty can be managed in your content management system. Key actions include:
Checking your website includes relevant key words for your products, services and industry or sector. Google KeyWord Planner can show you which words/phrases are most searched in your industry - but don’t over stuff your site as Google will penalise. Your website needs to read very naturally!;
Adding SEO header “meta- titles” and “meta-descriptions” to each page and “alt tag” titles to each image tells a search engine the name of the page or image and what each page is about so it can easily match it with a relevant search. Alt tags on images also support a great user experience for visually impaired visitors which Google rewards;
Checking your website displays well (and loads fast!) for mobile users. With mobile traffic having overtaken desktop, Google is now operating a “mobile first” policy that puts the mobile user’s experience of your website as a top search engine ranking criteria.
Result: your website should start to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) so your potential customers can find and engage your business quickly and easily.
4. Add back links and internal links and monitor frequently
Appropriate, relevant third party websites that link to yours demonstrate to Google that your site is interesting and valued. Ideally back links should point to different areas of a website and not just the homepage. The more of these links you can acquire, the higher you will rank in Google search results. Beware though - these links must be relevant to your product or service and they must work. Irrelevant, inappropriate or broken links will be penalised and could negatively impact ranking.
Likewise, the internal links between pages of your own website also show Google that your website has a real depth of information, is well structured and easy to navigate, evidencing an intuitive customer journey and positive customer experience. Widely available tools like Screaming Frog review all the links on your website and highlight any broken ones that can then be redirected.
Result: with more credible back links you should enjoy higher traffic and improved rankings as Google rewards your popular and trustworthy content.
5. Get familiar with Google Analytics
Lastly, if you’ve made adjustments to your website you’ll need to understand the impact. Used by millions worldwide, Google Analytics enables your business to monitor website performance through visitor numbers and behaviour, sources and exit points and much much more. The insight informs where to focus attention, to adapt and review. Linking Analytics to Google Tag Manager and Google Adwords provides another level of data regarding performance of key words, specific advertising campaigns as well as understanding the customer journey through your website and monitoring KPI’s performance such as online bookings, enquiries etc.
Result: customer experience is improved by a better performing website and audience propensity to engage with your business is increased. Subsequently search engines reward frequent improvements with better search engine result page rankings.
These are just some of the steps you can take to invigorate your website. If you would like support to make your website really sing - please get in touch.
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