Review and improve your website for 2012
Traditionally January is when we spend time looking back to the past and forward to the future, so now is the time to do this with your business website. It won’t take hours on end, but could prove really valuable in moving your business forward in the new year.
The review – measuring the impact of your website last year….
- Visitors – If you have a tool to analyse visits to your site, such as Google Analytics, take some time to look at this with a view to a whole year. This will give you information on seasonal peaks and troughs. You could then drill down and see what was your most popular page, which blog post was most visited, and which ones people stayed reading for the longest. (If you don’t currently have a tracking tool, contact us and we can add one to your site, at a low cost) Take a little time to think about why those peaks and troughs happened when they did, is your business seasonal? Did you make changes to your site around these times? Did you do other marketing that led visitors to your site? Is the subject of your most popular blog fulfilling a need of your target market? etc etc
- Design – Did you make any changes to the layout or navigation on your website in 2011? if so is this still effective and reflective of your brand? Does it look and feel fresh and present you at your best? Is the site easy to navigate? Is it leading people to where you want them to go?
- Content – Take some time to read through every page of your site. Is the content correct? Do prices, processes and what you offer need to be updated? Are the images out of date. Have you broadened the range of your offer? Are you targeting the same market this year as you did in the last year?
- Other marketing – did you effectively use other marketing in combination with your website?
Plan and improve
- Visitors – now you’ve seen how visitors have behaved on your site over a year you can use this to plan improvements. What can you do in quieter months to raise the number of visits; increasing your activity on social media? Writing blogs/news features more regularly? Buying pay per click advertising? Or offline ads with QR codes driving people to your site on their phone? Could you set up competitions, have special offers? The list of possibilities is practically endless so think about what would work best for your target market and your brand, then decide which you’ll do, when you’ll do it and how you’ll measure its impact. Armed with the knowledge of which blog posts or articles were the most popular last year, could you develop a series around the most effective ones, or write posts under similar themes?
- Design – How could the design, branding, layout of the site be improved to engage visitors with your business, and get them to do what you want them to do on your website. This might be signing up for a newsletter, buying products, watching a video, or emailing you. We are always happy to give feedback on improvements that could be made so get in touch if you’d like some help.
- Content – Probably the most time consuming is making updates to your site to ensure it is current and presenting you at your best. If you can’t do this now, make a plan for when you can do this. Ideally once it’s up-to-date, keep it fresh with some weekly, or monthly housekeeping of the site. Here is a blog with a list of regular things to check… If you can’t login and update the site yourself, it might be worth having the site converted so you can do this. (Contact us for more info about this option)
- Other marketing – how can you use your other marketing, in conjunction with your website more effectively in 2012? Take a look at your overall marketing plan (if you have one, and if you don’t consider making one) and think how you can bring each of your marketing activities together to make them stronger, it’s often a case with marketing that when you tie each activity together they are greater than the sum of their parts. So could you use some editorial in the local newspaper to drive traffic to a specific page of your website, where you’ll also display a sepcial offer for people who sign-up to your newsletter? Again think about what would suit your target market and your brand.
If you would like further help with reviewing, improving or measuring impact the of your website, get in touch. We can discuss your website face-to-face in Chester, or via Skype or telephone or of course email if you are based further afield. We are happy to provide feedback free of charge.
You’re so blimin’ helpful! So much to think about, thanks again Twizzlebird, you’re ace! : )
Thank you, we’re pleased it was helpful.