Back to all articlesIf you’re thinking of making some quick website improvements but you’re short on time and/or low on budget, here are five things you can do in-house with very little hassle.
A website is never truly finished, and ideally should be a continual work-in-progress to ensure you’re providing the best experience and information to your audience, and the search engines. However, with other business pressures and commitments to keep on top of, websites often get left unattended. When was the last time you looked through it? When was the last update you made?
Whether they’re improvements you can implement straight away, or starting points for slightly bigger projects down the line, these tips will set you on the path to better performance.
Website improvements worth finding a little time for
Diagnostics
Getting a clear view on your site’s performance is a great way to identify any issues to work on. Checks such as mobile responsiveness, speed, checking your Google Analytics and even running a quick web audit will help you to get a view of any critical issues to work into your plans and budget, and to see where you’re losing or failing to capture visitors.
Outdated information
Whether it’s the number of years you’ve been operating, current team members, accreditations or impressive clients… if your content is out of date, it’ll only take a quick run-through to make those changes. If you don’t have access to your website’s CMS (content management system), make a quick list of the required updates and ask your developer to implement them for you. A half hour job won’t break the bank.
Calls to action
Have a look through your web pages and check if there’s a ‘call to action’ on each one. Are you providing an easy way for prospects to contact you? Are you leading them to other relevant and helpful information? If your calls to action are hidden in your content, add a button to direct users to your contact page. If you have pages that don’t convert, focus on these first and see if you can encourage more engagement with a few minor adjustments.
Build your audience
If you use social media as part of your marketing strategy, make sure your accounts are linked with your website. If you don’t already have direct links to your chosen platforms, add them as soon as possible to help you convert visitors into social followers. You could even add a newsletter sign-up form to help you build a GDPR-compliant database of potential customers.
Clarify your offering
If your website hasn’t been optimised, you’re missing a trick. However, while putting SEO in place is a much bigger job than can be achieved over a cuppa, there’s one thing you could do to quickly improve your website for human visitors and the search engines. Simply run through your key web pages and alter the main heading on each. Think about how people will search for that product/service and write a catchy headline that includes those keywords. By clearly showing visitors and the algorithms what that page is about and approaching it from a search-friendly POV, you’ll attract more traffic and reduce your bounce-rate.
So there you go… next time you have a spare 20 minutes, you’ll have some ideas for updating your site to increase its performance. If you feel you require something a little more in-depth than some quick website improvements, drop us a line and we’ll take a more detailed look and recommend some strategies to help.