Is your website consistently driving results for your business? Is it adaptive to changes on the web? With rapid advances in website technology, design and function have evolved, bringing a new set of expectations to your visitors. With these expectations and advanced features ultimately affecting the success of the business online, being able to respond effectively is essential.
We’re not saying a complete rebuild of your website is necessary every 12 months, but minor tweaks, layout improvements and updated content are just a few ways to keep your website fresh! The needs of your website, or at least how people use it, will likely change throughout its life. Being able to respond to that change is essential for maintaining customer engagement.
It can be a daunting process. To make it easier, we have created a list of suggestions to ensure you unlock your website’s potential.
7 ways to keep your website relevant
1. Build your site on a Content Management System (CMS) – such as WordPress, Drupal, SquareSpace.
This is single-handedly the most important piece of advice for a business with limited web-dev resources. An advanced CMS platform offers huge freedom to customise content, compared to one that was hard-coded. You can easily swap bits in and out, and if you have a decent understanding of the system, make simple changes to the whole visual layout, without having to spend hundreds (or thousands) hiring a developer. Most CMS platforms offer an intuitive interface which removes the need to learn HTML too. This can be a real time saver, if maintaining the site is not your fulltime priority!
With an increasing number of web visits coming from mobile devices, ensuring your site is responsive to different screen sizes is absolutely essential too. Many CMS platforms offer mobile responsiveness. If yours isn’t, you’re already way behind the game!
2. Observe how your visitors use your website
Analytical tools such as Google Analytics + Search Console provide an incredible amount detail and invaluable insights as to how people are actually interacting with your site. Goal tracking, a powerful feature of Google Analytics analyses the effectiveness of particular product channels and sales conversions. Set up correctly, it makes it easy to pinpoint where customers are dropping off or what is triggering purchases. This helps to outline where you can improve your sales channels to maximise conversion success.
Analytical software allows you to observe a range of other insightful trends too: Are there large blocks of text that are being ignored? Are your visitors finding what they are looking for? How far down the page are they viewing before losing interest? Thanks to tools like Sumo and Crazy Egg, we can gain a much deeper understanding of how visitors are using our website. If nobody pays attention to that beautiful full width banner, is it worth having?
Making your site as easy as possible for visitors to use is essential for ensuring they become customers. The likes of Google Analytics are free to use, and most paid versions of software offer free or limited period trial versions. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be looking into them!
3. Interpret and respond to your analytics
If the majority of your traffic is ignoring your featured product, swap it for something else! If they are searching for an FAQ, make sure it is clearly visible from the homepage! Are visitors dropping off before they reach your call to action further down the page? What can you change to ensure they all see it? If they aren’t scrolling through, it is time you spent some time reworking your site’s layout.
4. Make sure your audience can find you
A lot of the work here comes back to your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Are you using the right keywords for your brand/offering? What words are people using to find your product/service? How do you rank in searches? One way to influence these variables is through regular, targeted content. Publishing blog articles or (even better) video material is an easy way to give visitors a reason to keep coming to your site. This in turn, boosts the value of your SEO. Don’t stress if you can’t maintain a schedule of posting each day either. If you have a big catalogue of material, drip feed it out over the course of the year. Maintaining a steady rhythm is far better than dumping 20 articles all at once. Consistency is the key here!
5. Do the words on your site clearly describe what you do?
It’s one thing to write for the Google bots that will crawl your site and determine where to show you on search, but at the end of the day, decisions are made by humans. If your visitors are browsing your website desperately wondering what it is exactly that you do, chances are they are going to move on pretty quickly. No amount of keywords will help if your message doesn’t make sense. If you don’t have the time or the confidence to write your own copy, it’s highly worth getting someone to do it for you.
6. Give your visitors a reason to trust you
Real life testimonials from customers who have actually purchased or worked with you can make or break the decision to buy from you. There are a number of places where these can come from – Social Media pages such as your Facebook page or your Google My Business page are just two, but there’s nothing stopping you from replicating them on your website (with their permission of course!). Displaying customer logos (if your work is B2B) is a great way to showcase your brand’s credibility.
7. Make it easy for your visitors to take action
Whether that action is in the form of purchasing something from your website or filling out a contact form, it’s absolutely vital that you make it as easy as possible. The less hoops prospective customers have to jump through to get what they want, the more inclined they will be to take action. If you have hyperlinked text as your call to action, consider substituting it for a big eye-catching button. The call to action is the main objective of your page, why hide it?
If you are not sure what is and isn’t working, or if you know your website needs a bit of a touch-up, talk to us – we are the experts!
Tell us what your goals are: traffic or sales
