The web is ever evolving and is advancing rapidly. These days you need to be updating your website on a regular basis to keep it looking fresh and performing well. Here is a list we have compiled from research and what we have experienced through the last 12 months of building websites for our clients.
Ensure your Website is Running Smoother than a Rolls-Royce Engine
First things first, your website needs to be top notch. When we talk about a businesses online presence, their website is at the centre of it. Everything else such as social media accounts, advertising etc all leads back to one place, the website. If your website is old & slow, you are just going to be wasting your time and money trying to push more traffic to it.
Here’s what I look for when assessing a website:
- The Design: Does the website look clean and modern? Or can you clearly tell it hasn’t had a refresh or rebuild since 2010?
- Navigation & User Friendliness: Can you navigate around the website easily? Can you reach the information you are looking for within three clicks?
- Website Speed: How quickly does the website load? Does it take longer than three seconds to load? Or is it nice and quick with initial load and while navigating through the website?
Making sure that you keep on top of these three core areas of your website, will greatly improve the chances of success for your website.
Fine Tune your on Page SEO
Next, Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short. SEO is one of the most powerful tools you can utilise on your website… Let me explain. When you take your website live on the internet, you can get to it by typing your website’s domain into the search bar. We all know that… Let’s say your business is a plumbing business in Hamilton, New Zealand. How cool would it be that someone could search up “plumbers in Hamilton, New Zealand” and your website is one of the first results? Meaning you organically are gaining leads through Google Search.
When you consider the sheer volume of searches being made on Google on a daily basis (8.5 billion) it’s almost a no brainer to optimise your website’s SEO. If 8.5 billion searches are being made per day, there are bound to be a large number of people who are searching for the product or service your business is offering. So why not try to make your website their first and final destination?
There are many different ways that you can go about performing SEO on your website:
- Implement Meta Tags: Implementing Meta Tags has become a pillar component of SEO. If you aren’t implementing them, then you are going to be seriously falling behind.
- Write Enticing Meta Descriptions: A lot of people will read the little meta description of your website or one of your website’s pages before they visit it. Make sure they are enticing to read and hook the viewer in!
- Accessibility: Google is starting to crunch down on website accessibility, so you need to ensure that your website is accessible. Make sure you are using text bigger than 14px, use HIGH contrasting colours and implement alt tags on all images.
For more information on Website SEO, check out my Ultimate SEO Guide here.
Utilise Content Marketing
Content marketing is something that is becoming more and more popular, this can also fall into the SEO side of your website as well. Content marketing is basically using content to garner organic traffic. With a website, you can use content marketing in the form of blog posts or articles to attract organic traffic to your website.
For instance, if you are a plumber. You can write content around plumbing for instance, what areas of plumbing to get into, where to go to get your plumbing apprenticeship, etc etc and then post these pieces of content to your website. Therefore, when someone searches up “Where to get a plumbing apprenticeship” the piece of content you wrote might come up and then they are directed to your website.
This may not get you a lead right away, but they will have seen your business. If your content is really good, then they’ll most likely come to you in the future if they ever need a plumber. Content marketing isn’t just about garnering more organic traffic, but also building rapport with your audience and potential customers.
Create a Social Media Presence for your Business
Social media is another form of content marketing. You can use social media as a tool to garner an audience and attention on social platforms using many different forms of posts and then direct them to your website.
For example, you can create your plumbing business an Instagram page and then start posting plumbing related content on that Instagram account. You can post things such as images from jobs, testimonials, helpful plumbing tips & tricks, just to name a few. These posts will then serve as the content marketing for your Instagram account and your Instagram account will serve as the traffic source for your businesses website.
Not only are Instagram, Facebook and all of the other social media platforms great for driving traffic to your website, they are also almost a necessity for creating social proof for your business.
In other words, having social media accounts and pages for your business in 2023 is a must.
Start Collecting Emails and Run a Newsletter and Promotional Campaigns
One of the most powerful tools in business for the last decade or so has been EMAIL. Finding effective and ethical ways to collect the emails of potential customers can turn into a great source of revenue for your business.
We have all seen how businesses these days utilise email to generate revenue. For example, a clothing company advertises a 20% discount when you sign up for their mailing list. You’d think “wow 20% that’s a big saving” but in hindsight, they are going to push promotional emails to you for the next number of years and you are going to well over spend that 20% it cost them before you ultimately unsubscribe from their mailing list.
The same sort of model can be used for any other business. For example, if you are running a plumbing business. You can run a promotional campaign advertising 10% off your first consultation, all they need to do is sign up with their email address. You now have their email and can periodically send out promotional emails regarding your business.
