Essential New Year Housekeeping for your website
For me the dawn of a new year is a time to reflect and look forward to making fresh starts, New Year’s resolutions and building on the successes of the previous year. It’s a prime opportunity to look at your website and conduct some essential housekeeping, maintenance and planning in order to give your site some much needed TLC.
Review the performance of your website
In order to move forward and develop a website you first need to review the overall performance of it. This may sound obvious but ask yourself, exactly what is my website promoting or selling? Is the site working for you? You’ll need to identify which areas have performed well and which have not. Have you received any visitor/customer feedback? Has this feedback good or bad?
Look at your traffic statistics
If you are serious about the search engine optimisation of your website you’ll have already installed some sort of website traffic analytic software (my personal preference is Google Analytics). This will enable you to get an insight into the amount of traffic you’re receiving, where this traffic is coming from, what search terms visitors are using to find your website, how long they are staying on site and what your conversion rates, if any, you are receiving.
Identify areas for improvement
Next you need to identify the areas of your website which need some attention. Once you’ve identified these areas you’ll need to ask yourself how they can be improved.
Is the websites content informative and engaging to the user? Are you adding new content on a regular basis? If this isn’t the case think about different methods of deploying this content such as a blog and the sort of content that you could include.Is there an obvious call to action where is matters? I once read that a website should be treated like a book. It should have a beginning, middle and end. You should firstly aim to draw users into the website from the landing page, give them the content they are looking for and then guide them to an end result, be this a purchase or online enquiry.
Take a critical look at the navigation and ask yourself if visitors can easily navigate to the key sections of your site in two or three clicks. Remember, a poor or confusing navigation system will put visitors off if they can’t find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. It’s good to bear in mind that your competitor’s website is only one click away.
Think about extending the list of keyword phrases that you are targeting. Do this by taking a good look at your traffic stats. These will reveal the types of phrases being used to find your website. Make a note of them and check out their positions in the SERP’s. From here you can begin to target alternative keyword phrases by developing new content which focuses on these search terms.
Set yourself targets and a timetable
Once you have identified the areas of concern and worked out a plan of action in order to address these issues. The next step will be to break this list down into bite size chunks and set achievable targets/deadlines for each task to be completed.
Allocate a set amount of time each week/fortnight or month to concentrate on working on your websites development. You’ll find that be doing a little and often you’ll start to make a big difference to the overall development and success of your websites performance.
