Your website is one of the most valuable marketing assets your business has. When it's performing well, it's a 24/7 marketing machine that can generate new leads and help you deliver great information to your audience. When a website isn't performing to it's potential, it can be an eyesore and distance your business from the people you're trying to help.
Many businesses jump for a complete redesign when a site isn't delivering the right results. This process, however, can take months and also be very expensive. Often, there is good content on your site already.
Instead of pursuing a complete overhaul of your website, here are 3 Easy Steps to Improve Your Website (Plus one extra at the end!). Use these tips to focus your effort where it has the highest impact on your website's performance:
When planning the design and content of your website, you likely started by identifying your audience (or personas) and planning the tone, visual style, and other aspects of the site to cater to those ideal customers.
Even though this is absolutely the BEST way to optimize a site for your users, you may have accidentally neglected a vital audience member: Google.
Think of a search engine like the salesperson at your local record store. There's no way that person can listen to every album and make the perfect recommendation every time you come in, so he/she uses things like genre, name, record label, and recent best-sellers to make an educated suggestion for what you're looking for. For a webpage, these categories can include page title, meta keywords, meta descriptions, and your website's reputation.
To Increase your Search Engine Optimization, use these tips to make sure your webpage is highly recommended:
Design trends are always changing, but this change is not purely aesthetically motivated. Many modern web design trends are based around user interaction. Minimalism, flat design, responsive design, and current visual hierarchy trends exist because they have been proven to produce positive results for many organizations.
If you want to increase your website's conversions, or simply provide your users with a more positive experience, it's worthwhile to take a good, hard look at your current website's design. In many cases, making a few tweaks to your site can give you a performance boost similar to a redesign, with much less time or expense.
Here are a few key areas to look at when evaluating your website's design:
It's not hard to argue that content-overload exists, especially when looking at popular blog topics. Unless your business exists in a specific niche, it's almost impossible to get search engines to pick up your content about 101 topics anymore; there's just too much existing content. Don't be fooled, though, content is still king, it just needs to be tackled in the right way.
First, make sure your current content is easily digestible. Similar to design trends, content trends exist because they have been proven to work in many cases. Take the format of this blog. It's organized as a list with sub-lists in between, which lets the reader (YOU!) quickly glance and digest the information, and skip the parts you don't want to read.
TLDR: Give your users what they're looking for, quickly and easily.
(See what I did there?)
Here's your list of quick tips for analyzing and improving your content:
Here's an extra tip for free! If you REALLY want to improve your website, you need to get acquainted with data and User Experience. The absolute best way to make sure your website is delivering a great experience to your users is simply to ask them. Using modern measurement tools to gather user feedback helps you make the best decisions about what to fix on your site. These fixes will give your audience a better experience, increase your conversions, and increase your online-marketing efforts effectiveness and accountability, but it does take a lot of work.
Here are some tools to help you collect user feedback:
So there's your roadmap to improving your website. Take this information and focus your efforts on:
If you have additional questions, please contact us today. We're happy to lend a hand.