Keep Customers In the Know with Regular Website Updates

“The customer is always right!” This famous adage also applies for the content direction and desired interaction with your brand. If you wait to reach out to them until you want their business, there’s a good chance it could go unnoticed. Making time to connect with them through meaningful interactions and active engagements will cultivate an awareness of your company’s ongoing activities.

As we always remind our clients: Your website is the central nervous system for your entire sales and marketing output. It is the first place that customers will look to get an impression about your brand, learn about your company, so it’s critical that to have implement processes, procedures and updates that keep you ranked near the top of specific searches.

Here are five effective tips that we use when developing and managing websites for our clients that will ensure your site continually offers value to customers and maintains peak performance for new business development.

Freshen the Content Regularly

Have you ever visited a restaurant’s website in the middle of January and noticed that they still have their Thanksgiving menu highlighted? Sure, they had a great idea to add a special seasonal menu to the front page. The problem was that they couldn’t execute nor manage the website well and let it stay up too long. Schedule monthly reminders to check your website and update the content on the homepage will help to keep everything in line.

Make Sure It Has a Call to Action

Take a step back and ask the question to yourself: what is the ultimate action you want visitors to execute when they visit your website? Examples of common CTAs include:

• Sign up for your email list or newsletter
  • When people sign up for your email list, you create an ongoing connection allowing you to market to them.
• Shop online in your e-commerce environment – If you sell products online, try embedding pictures of a few products on your homepage to entice buyers to click through, or add a prominent “Shop Now” button.
• Fill out a lead form – If you sell services instead of products, encourage visitors to fill out what’s called a lead form. It captures contact information so you can follow up. Rewards for filling out a form might include a downloadable white paper or article.

Photography and Video

Properly photographing client material to showcase your company’s work through case studies is important. Good lighting, a solid background and clean, quality photos make a website feel more promising and professional for the viewer. Does your homepage appear too text-heavy? Consider breaking it up with professional photographs that show your team, business or products.

Update Your Design to Current Day

Breaking news: A website designed in 2010 will look antiquated when compared with one designed in 2022! Outdated web design will lead your customer base with the notion that your company is not up to date, or worse, out of business. It’s best to update the entire website; if budget is a concern, we’d recommend refreshing the homepage with impactful content and addressing secondary pages afterward.

SEO

SEO analytics is a method of collecting and analyzing your website’s data to gain a better understanding of performance. Auditing content will provide you with information on drops in search traffic, changes to Google’s algorithms, technical issues, etc. It is important to keep this updated so your website doesn’t fall in the search engine rankings.

In addition to updating the content, two other critical improvements that can be made on the fly are improving page speed and making the site mobile responsive. If the homepage loads too slowly, visitors will be turned off and search engines will dock your site in their rankings. While most website templates contain a mobile-responsive foundation, the functionality can break down if the site isn’t managed properly — another problem that can cause your site to tumble in the search rankings. As your customers are very likely to be searching on a smartphone, it’s critical that you make their experience seamless.

From the latest trends in search engine optimization to sleek design and programming, our team can sharpen your digital image, boost brand awareness and define your audience. Contact us to schedule a free website audit and consultation today!