If you have a website then hopefully you know just how important it is to update it. There’s no time like the New Year to get into a pattern of regular website updating and editing.
It doesn’t mean that you necessarily have ground-breaking news or have changes your product line, but just keeping it fresh with the latest piece of news, update your team page, etc.
In website-terms nothing is worse than a site that isn’t up to date, and the main benefits of regular (at least monthly) updating are:
- you look ‘current’ to website visitors
- you look ‘relevant’ to search engines as a lively site they should present to users as a search result
- existing and new clients feel like they can find useful information there
Site Refresh Ideas
Looking at a website and trying to decide what to do and how to do it can be like looking at a blank wall and hoping for inspiration into how to make it dynamic and interesting. Most importantly, you don’t need to do it all at once, slow and steady works best for websites as ongoing change is what Search Engines like.
Here’s a starting list of ideas in rough order of priority:
- Update your Homepage – add a new image, tweak the starting sentence to better reflect your vision/ be more concise … lose ‘Welcome’ if that is first and use a keyword you want to be found for instead
- Calls To Action - basically means what you want someone to do once they’ve read your page. Perhaps give you a call, read another page. If you go through each page, even the most static like ‘History’ you should be able to put a link at the end or encouragement, eg. ‘See our current product list’
- Check your product/service list is up to date and if you can write it more simply or re-organise it to better reflect your key products then do. Secondly (and quite usefully), consider splitting out each product/service to have it’s own page and link to those pages from all over (see #3)
- Read any page and try to look for places within the text that you could link to other pages on your site, for example: “Our team will provide a professional air-conditioning service” can link to two places. These are called ‘internal links’ and help people to navigate
- Consider starting or expanding (like #2) your FAQ section. This isn’t to replace support or people calling you, but helps to further expand your site (good for Search Engines) and be more of a resource to customers
- Consider adding ‘News’ items if you haven’t already. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t require a full page to be written but could be short snippets like ‘Joe Bloggs joins as Supplies Manager’ and then a short bio about them, even if that’s repeated on the ‘Our Team’ page
- Search for you site in Search Engines using this structure “site:yourdomain.com” … so we would search for “site:freshspring.co.uk” and see what comes up. Think about each line being there to encourage someone to click to your site and how you might want to change it. This will involve changing your ‘Meta’ tags and may require some techy involvement and each one needs to be unique
Use Your Statistics!
Every website can have statistics, both on-server (AW Stats/ Webalizer) and off-site with the likes of Google Analytics or Statcounter. You may not have viewed them before but they should be there, just ask for help!
Just like a shop would have a vague idea of who comes through the door, how long they browse the shelves, etc you would want to know roughly the same information about your site and then tailor things accordingly.
The best statistic to look at is the number of unique visitors (not hits!) and see whether that is rising or falling and then perhaps what areas of the site people are looking at. This will help you to see what people are interested in and you might want to further tailor those pages to what you want people to see and keep watching the statistics on a monthly basis.
Of course you can do a lot with statistics (and waste a lot of time!) but if you haven’t already engaged with them then start slow and just try to get a feel and slowly add to your knowledge. A really useful place to do this can be Google Webmaster Tools which requires a bit of setup but gives you info on what searches people are doing to find your site, which terms you are going up/down for and so on.
Send Regular Email Newsletters
No, we don’t mean spam everyone you know with weekly drivel but if you aren’t sending out email newsletters then you are missing out one of the most important ways of engaging with your customer and the most effective in terms of driving traffic to your site.
Some website systems (like our freshSPRING CMS) allow you to do this within your site, but if not then signing up for a service like MailChimp (free up to a certain limit) is an easy way to get started.
Get Technical and Graphical Help
Of course this might not be so easy if you don’t have an editing system for your site, though your site can be transplanted onto such a system (without needing to change the look!). Indeed we do this a lot and there’s both an opportunity not just to make a site editable but also to improve its output to Search Engines, automatically update areas (like a news or events feed) and so on.
Graphically, you might need to get a few photos or even want an overhaul. Certainly avoid copying images from places like Google Images or you will fall foul of copyright in some form. Just give us a call on 020 7078 3954 and we’ll be happy to advise on where you can buy or find free royalty-free images.
