Most businesses have a website, and websites can go out of date surprisingly quickly. Therefore you need to invest time in your website every now and then, to keep it up to date.
So today I thought I’d share with you three things to do when updating your website:
- Make your content clear, useful and engaging
- Build in your calls to action
- Make sure your site is optimised for search engines
Read below to learn more about these three areas.
Make your content clear, useful and engaging
People have short attention spans, so if you don’t hook your reader within 3 to 5 seconds, the chances are that they will click away from your site and onto someone else’s.
Therefore, you need to make your message strong and clear.
Be sure to highlight what you can do for them, however ensure you don’t pack it full of so much information that you just confuse them.
The point is to drive the reader to make a purchase, or to call you, so make sure it is easy for them to do that.
Build in your calls to action
For anyone browsing the internet, or searching for something specific, many websites actually look very similar, therefore you need to make yours stand out!
Call to actions are usually buttons, but could be a form or link – they pop from the website and entice the reader to click on or respond to them.
So what do you want your reader to do? If it’s to call, then your button will have a link to call your mobile, etc. Include many calls to action such as:
- Have an easily accessible enquiries form, or email link
- Have a button which links to your bookings system so they can make an appointment direct in your diary
- Ensure the reader can quickly access case studies or testimonials
- If you sell something online, make it easy to find those products or services
Make sure your site is optimised for search engines
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is something I talk about a lot, and I have other blogs and an ebook on the topic too.
But in short, each page needs to have a keyword specified, as well as meta descriptions set which are a short sentence summarising what the page is about.
The meta descriptions are the text that appears in search results, so this needs to be engaging to make the reader want to click through to your site.
It’s worth spending time getting to understand the basics of SEO, and there are free versions of SEO software available that will help with configuring this on each page of your website. One example is RankMath which I prefer to use, but Yoast is another well known WordPress plugin.
Next steps
If you haven’t reviewed your website for a while, be sure to go over it – better still, ask a colleague or client if they wouldn’t mind reading over it. Sometimes you can be too close to it to see that something doesn’t make sense, or that it’s not easy to find certain information, etc.
The same three steps above apply to your blogs or articles also, and Google loves websites which get updated regularly – it shows them you are still in business.
Google likes to present websites in their search engine which are relevant and informative, hence the need to make sure your content is clear.
For any additonal help please do check out our other blogs, or book a discovery call so we can chat further.