Has your website been up for a while and does it need improvement?
Did you used to get traffic but just not seeing the same traffic or you want to improve on the traffic you’re already getting?
Here are some ways to improve your company website.
1. Evaluate/Update Your Content
One of the first things you can do to improve your website is to make sure all the content is up to date. Sounds obvious, but this often goes overlooked. How you improve website content is to look at every page on the website and read over the content and make edits as you go. You can maybe skip updating every blog post article, but you’ll want to look through the topics covered on your blog and if anything is out of date or just irrelevant, then consider deleting that content. Don’t forget to set up a redirect to your home page from any pages you delete to make sure you don’t end up with 404 errors on your website.
2. Update Your Home Page
Another way to freshen up your website is to change images and content on your home page. A new slide show or new images could be just what your website needs. Or perhaps an updated logo or new sections that can be added to highlight new products or services at your company.
Make sure your home page states what you do. When a website visitor arrives at your page, make sure they know the who, what, where, when and why so they know they’ve landed on the right sight. All f this should be above the fold – meaning at the top of the page without scrolling. The home page also needs to have plenty of informational text – like upwards of 1200 words.
3. Enhance Content
Take a look at your traffic results. If you have Google Analytics and Google Search Console set up, dive into the details of that data and find out where people are going and how they’re getting to your website. These stats might help you see which content is working and which is not. For those working well, you should either add/enhance that content or add more articles/pages that support that content.
There is much you can do to improve content:
- Add more or change images
- Embed/add relevant videos
- Expand and enhance your content
- Consider a case study
- Add more resources and/or links
- Do keyword research
- Enhance article formatting with headings, bullets, bold, etc.
4. Calls to Action (CTA)
In order to get more conversions, you have to ask people to take some kind of action. Some websites don’t do this very well – they just assume people will head over to a contact page or buy page, but many will not.
Plan which CTAs you want to use – Contact Us, Request Quote, Buy Now, Sign Up, Enroll, etc. – then plan where to have each of your call to action statements on each page. Put your strongest one at the top.
5. Get Rid of the Junk
If a website has been around a while, it will likely have junk on it. Junk can be a number of things.
It can be unnecessary banners or links that don’t need to be on every page. It can be files or folders sitting on the server that may be indexed.
There may even be junk code on pages or active plugins that aren’t being used anymore.
Cleaning out junk can increase speed and make things look better – both to Google and to visitors coming to your website.
6. Upgrade Core Website and Plugins
Have you been keeping up with software upgrades? Most websites run on software that requires updates much the same as your mobile phone. Most websites also include many plugins/extensions that also must be managed and updated. Make sure you are keeping all software and plugins up to date.
Making sure you keep the website’s software updated also helps to ensure it will run quickly/smoothly as well as helping to ensure your website doesn’t get hacked, which can bring your website down or give your domain name a bad reputation.
7. Improve the Website Design / Redesign
Whitaker Web Design does website design, so we would be remiss if we failed to mention that website design is a great way to improve a website. It’s not only the design but the updated code with the latest techniques to make your site load quickly, have great structure and many other things you want from your site and that Google rewards.