Returning to work after a holiday, the start of a new year, or when creating the next business plan is a great time for us to look at ourselves and our work with fresh eyes to make improvements. But, just like you don’t need to go and fork out for a gym subscription to get fit, you don’t need to start over with a completely new website to improve your online presence either.
Here are our top 10 tips for how to give your website a refresh that will get it working better for you.
1. Relevant content
Let’s start with the basics… When was the last time you looked at the content on your website?
If you’re wondering why you’re not getting many enquiries, one reason could quite simply be a lack of engaging content on your site.
To increase the chance of search engines like Google giving you higher priority on their results pages, your need to improve how they view your site as more relevant than your competitors’. That means, you need to have at least 300 – 500 words on your page and make sure the keyword is used two or three times on the page.
2. Quality content
Is your content tailored to your audience? Targeted content should be useful to your website visitor and help them find answers they are looking for (that your product/service solves). Try to be consistent in your design, keeping to your brand look and feel to present a professional appearance, and offer a variety of marketing content. Things like blog posts, videos, infographics and other forms of interesting, visually attractive and shareable information are a must; not just to keep your customers happily engaged, but to optimise your site for search engines too (“search engine optimisation“).
3. User-friendly design
Your website visitors want a functional and easy-to-use website that makes it quick and simple to find what they are looking for. Having a user-friendly website design means making your site accessible to everyone, no matter what their ability or the device they are using to access it. For example, a straightforward thing you can do to immediately improve your site’s accessibility is to ensure that your images are relevant to the page content and labelled correctly for screen-readers. You should also check that your sitemap is up-to-date and provides a clear journey for your website for users and for search engines to crawl. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, like a lot of web users do today, think “mobile first”, and ensure that your site is mobile-friendly in every way.
4. Google Analytics
If you don’t already have Google Analytics installed, get it in place on your site. And if you do have it, which you will if we built your website, then it’s time to start checking your account every now and again.
Google Analytics tracks your website visitors’ cookies and therefore provides lots of data to tell you about what your visitors are doing on your website. This collective data can give you important insights into your audience and how they engage with your content that you can use to keep improving on it.
5. A need for speed
It doesn’t really matter how useful, pretty, or clever your website is if it loads slowly. That alone can make a huge impact on your visitors’ user experience and cause you to lose them.
Just think about the last time you were on a slow website waiting for it to load. Remember the sense of frustration? We’re getting increasingly used to interacting with sites quickly, so for most people, a slow site will cause them to lose patience and leave for somewhere else that works better for them.
Ideally you want your site to load in around 2 seconds. Apart from improving your retention of website traffic from doing that, there’s more good news from making these moves because, according to SEMRush:
- if your site loads in 2.9 seconds, it is faster than approximately 50% of the web
- if your site loads in 1.7 seconds, it is faster than approximately 75% of the web
There are some technical things your website provider can do – like upgrading your hosting, and adding a CDN and caching – but you’ll be glad to hear that there are quick wins you can make to improve your site speed through better website content management too. Things like reducing page load content (such as videos, PDF downloads, lots of images etc) is a good start. Consider optimising files and images to make sure they are smaller “web” sizes and sized correctly so that they are not slowed down by your browser having to scale them too.
Curious to know what speed your site is running at? We recommend using the scanning tool at gtmetrix.com
6. Visible CTAs
Do your pages have calls to action? If not, that’s a good place to start when it comes to making tweaks to your content. If you do have them, look at whether you have enough of them and how they’re positioned on the page. After all, these are the opportunities you are giving your website visitor to contact you, so you want to make it as easy as possible for them.
From experience of our Conversion Rate Optimisation work with customers, we can tell you that small changes like making your calls to action more visual and putting them higher up the page, can give you considerable increases to the number of enquiries you get from them.
7. Forms
Your website forms are where you capture your enquiries, and very often businesses can ask too much, too soon. Experience tells us that users find it off-putting to have to fill in reams of information about themselves, especially when making first contact. So, when giving your website a refresh, think about how you can keep your forms as simple (and quick to complete) as possible. After all, you can always follow up with more questions when you start a relationship and actually get talking.
8. Chat
We implemented live chat on more of our customers websites last year than ever before. So, with that increasing demand and some of the great results we’ve heard about improved customer engagement with it, we’ve recently decided to test it for ourselves on debouge.co.uk.
Weighing up the costs, we think it’s worth trying even if only for the insights we hope to get from the kind of questions we get. But, for no more than an hour’s time to add it to your site, we recommend this for any business willing to give some time to be “on demand” to answer customers’ questions when they are browsing your website. We’ll keep you posted about our results…
9. SSL certificates
Security is as important as ever across your entire business, so do not forget your website when you are looking at your cyber security measures. Having a Secure Sockets Layer “SSL” certificate is your website’s digital certificate authenticating your site’s identity and enabling an encrypted connection. In short, that means having a “HTTPS” website address instead of a “HTTP” shows you have an SSL certificate keeping your internet connections secure and preventing criminals from reading or modifying information transferred between the two systems. So when you or your customers see the padlock icon next to the URL in the address bar, you can trust that the website you are visiting is SSL protected.
An SSL certificate can be purchased at your hosting provider for around £50 – £100 per year, which is well worth the investment.
10. Social media integration
People want to engage on social media so why not make it easy for them by adding opportunities to share your website content and interact with you? This one is a bit of a no-brainer, but it’s worth a mention because it’s another quick win for an easy thing to do to help bring traffic to your site.