I often find that SME owners invest dollars having a website designed and built, but then neglect to maintain it. While a website can be one of your most powerful marketing tools, it’s not something you can set and forget. It needs to be refreshed regularly to deliver the best results.
A website that’s outdated either aesthetically or from a functional perspective can damage your professional image and deter, rather than attract, potential leads.
In tech terms, two years is a really long time. So if your website hasn’t been touched for longer than that, it’s definitely time for an update or perhaps, even total rebuild. Consider, in line with your current business objectives, how you can improve the following aspects of your website:
Optimise conversions
If you’re finding that you have a high bounce rate and low conversions, this means that visitors are finding your site, but they’re leaving again after looking at a single page. Why? They can’t find what they came looking for, the pages are too slow to load, or the navigation needs improvement.
Optimally, your website should be attracting and then engaging visitors to the point where they can be funneled through to a call-to-action or sales conversion of some sort.
When refreshing your website, consider using the following tactics to achieve this:
- Simplify layout
- Ensure copy is engaging and relevant
- Ensure pages load quickly (just a one-second delay reduces conversions by 7%)
- Site navigation should be simple and intuitive
- Good search functionality
- Include a clear call to action
Time for a re-design?
Web design trends are constantly evolving to improve the user experience and streamline navigation. If your website was put together a while ago, its functionality (and marketing performance) can be improved by updating to a more modern format, such as:
- Long-scroll navigation (familiar from social media sites) enables “storytelling”, and promotes user interaction.
- Card layouts, present easily-scanned, clickable bytes of graphics and information in a series of easily-scanned clickable boxes.
- The use of whole-page “hero” images can engage visitors and help funnel them towards a call-to-action message.
Are you attracting mobile traffic?
A massive 60% of internet traffic is now generated from mobile device, so it’s absolutely essential that your website looks great and works properly on all styles of tablets and smartphones as well as PCs. “Responsive design” is the technology that automatically optimises a website to whatever device it is being viewed on.
Making sure your website has responsive design will maximise traffic opportunities, and, because Google now favours mobile-friendly sites, it will assist with your search engine rankings.
Does it reinforce your brand?
Your brand can evolve over time, so if it’s been a while since you looked at your website, you may find that it no longer aligns with your core messaging or primary marketing strategies. Ensure your website accurately reinforces your brand; this will help solidify your professional image and build trust with your target market.
Improve rankings with fresh content
How easy is it for you to add new content to your website? Sites that are regularly updated with relevant, interesting copy are crawled by the Google bots more often, resulting in improved search engine rankings. When updating your website, ask your developer to include the back-end functionality that will enable you to easily add and update content as necessary.
For many SMEs, a great website can form the hub of your marketing strategy. If yours is under-performing or not actively working to attract and convert solid leads for your business, then a refresh can help kick-start some solid activity and interest.
