Maximise your website's success

The worst thing you can do with a new website is just sit back and expect the new leads and enquiries to flow through the door, unless of course you are employing an Agency like us to provide you with the digital marketing support you need! What you must do is keep your website updated – it’s incredibly important to drive your website forward, as if you don’t, no matter how great the site is, or how compelling an offer you have, people just won’t find you in the first place. Here are a few pointers that will hopefully help…

Content strategy – plan it!

There’s no getting away from it, content is an incredibly useful tool in modern digital marketing – to an extent, as long as the quality is good, you can’t get enough of it! All this points towards the benefit of generating more content whether that be on your website, social channels or through the press but we’re all busy people, and unless you have the luxury of hiring an external agency, the best way of ensuring you adhere to a structured content strategy is to plan one…

Set time aside to think of blog titles for the next 3 months, set-up some social content via Hootsuite, plan your press releases prior to an event. By doing all of this, and writing a structured plan for when your content needs to be both written and posted and sticking to it, you will be amazed at how much more successful your website is.

Share share share

Once you have created all this high quality content, it’s important to tell people about it! If your website is properly set-up, blog posts and articles should start being indexed for keywords you have targeted so you will start to gain some organic traffic from search engines, but to really maximise success, sharing your content over your social media channels will vastly increase the number of people you can interact with, and if your content is engaging, your reach will be even greater.

Sharing your content can be something as simple as creating a post on your business Facebook account and sharing this on your personal account, but to really engage people you want something a bit more exciting. Try a competition – give something away to everyone who shares your content, or even just if they like your page or follow you. If you have something compelling to offer, your chances of reaching a wider audience who may not have heard of you before becomes much, much greater.

High quality, but fast loading images

Modern websites are very visual, and the quality of your images can often make or break them. As with every other aspect of your website, updating pictures is important, whether you want to give the homepage a different feel or add a little more spice to your blog posts. When you are updating and adding new pictures, don’t forget to crop them to the correct size to ensure optimal load time.

You can use stock photography, but nothing beats the quality of hiring a professional photographer for a couple of hours to come and take pictures of you, your office or even lifestyle shots around where you work – these can work really well on a website, and an experienced photographer should ensure your pictures are cropped to the right size, and the right balance of quality for optimal loading times. Try http://www.picresize.com/, https://resizemyimg.com/ or https://croppio.com/ for easy cropping and resizing of images.

SEO basics

This is a biggie – so important in fact that we have dedicated two articles to it over the previous couple of weeks, so instead of me repeating what has been already said, have a look at the articles for yourself…

• A smart SEO solution for small businesses
• SEO site-level factors

Interactive content – video?

Content isn’t just about quantity – quality is even more important – one great piece of content that gets shared multiple times is far better than 10 poorly written, irrelevant pieces of content. One still perhaps slightly underused medium for content on websites is video. Although easy to embed via YouTube or Vimeo, creating video content can be trickier and expensive, but it may well be an investment worth making.

Users tend to engage more with video content and there’s so many ways you can use video content effectively, these include:

• A corporate video introducing your business and people – great for showing website visitors the people who they would be working with.
• Video testimonials… especially if you’re in an industry that relies on credibility and credentials, video testimonials from happy clients can add another layer of trust to what you do, underpinning everything positive you say about your business.
• Web adverts – is there a particularly compelling reason for people to choose you over a competitor? If so, how about storyboarding this in a clever web advert and then promoting via Facebook ads. A great way of highlighting points of difference.

So there you have it, a simple guide to maximising success of your website once it goes live. Of course if you want to talk through options in more detail, and would consider outsourcing some of this activity, then we would love to talk to you about what we may be able to offer!