Improve Your Website in Easy Steps – Part One

Set goals and measure

Without a goal, it is pointless starting anything so take the time to figure out the end product that your website is required to deliver.
When starting to build a new website, it’s extremely important to set goals but don’t stop there – make the website goals easily measurable and then tweak the goals over time so that the website is really working for you and generating the right type of traffic and business.

Research (steal from) the competition

Don’t copy, always strive to be different but… if your biggest competitor – the mighty Widgets Ltd – have a feature on their website that you feel works well, pinch that idea and make it better.

Write good content

As a rule, Google ranks the websites of ‘knowledge leaders’ very well. Generally, these websites will have a lot of good quality and well organised content so if you try to start with at least 500 words per page on your website with well-structured headings, Google will take notice.
The second way of leading people to your website is to write interesting content – write stuff that people will want to share and put it out there on Social Media!

Improve your blog

People enjoy reading interesting articles and there’s nothing better than a well-researched and interesting blog article or two on your website but there is nothing worse than a blog with two articles, the last of which was published in 2007.
If you’re going to write a blog, commit to it and make it interesting!

Have a call to action on every page

Website visitors get bored very quickly and for very little reason so it’s your job to define the customer journey through your website. If you have a great offer related to a page, put a button on that page and please make the thing visible!

Then, once you’ve made your button and considered your offer, ask yourself ‘why?’ – why should your visitor click here, what’s in it for them? Sign up for our newsletter – why? What is good about your special offer?

Put your phone number on the home page

As I said, website visitors tend to leave websites quickly and around 70% of all visitors will only visit your homepage. For this precise reason, display your contact details prominently – you’d be surprised how much this can affect the business coming from your website.

Make your about us page interesting

We all know your business passion is proactive synergy and safeguarded efficiencies but save this for another page! For your About Us page, get somebody to take a nice team photo and talk about things other than business. People do business with people and your about us page should be geared to this objective so talk about your pets and hobbies.

Add testimonials

We all know that people buy from people. One of the most powerful things that you can have on your website is a thoughtfully-written testimonial from a happy and satisfied customer. Even better than this, Google loves reviews so ask your customers to add a testimonial to your Google business page (you’ve got one of those, right? Right..?)

Claim a Google Business page

If you’re a business and you don’t have a Google Business page, you’re committing a sin. Go to www.google.com/business now (yes, now!) and get yours set up. Google looks at its own tools when ranking websites and, particularly for locally-focussed businesses, a Google Business page will do more for search traffic than anything else!

Make sure your site is mobile friendly

Since April 2015, Google has not ranked websites for searches made on mobile devices based on several factors. In plain English, this means that if somebody searches for a business like yours on a mobile device, Google will not show them any results from a website that is not optimised for mobile.