HOW TO DUST THE COBWEBS OFF YOUR WEBSITE IN 4 EASY STEPS
With Halloween right around the corner and spooky decorations adorning festive front porches, we’re reminded how easily your image can alter what you communicate to the world.
For most brands, your website typically serves as the first impression to potential customers, so you want to make sure it functions flawlessly and looks professional to send the right message. You may think that getting your website up and running is the end of the road, but many people underestimate the amount of work that goes into maintaining a site to ensure it continues to run smoothly.
Luckily, our RM webmasters have a few quick tips to ensure that your digital front door is always up to date. Check ‘em out! Then, take a look at the brand-new website we created for our crawlspace encapsulation client, Your Crawlspace. It’s a real treat.
1. CONDUCT AN SEO AUDIT.
Even if you think your site is running at peak performance, consistent evaluations can help you identify areas of improvement and new opportunities. SEO audits are essential to website maintenance and optimization, so we recommend conducting them quarterly, or after any major changes to your website. During this audit, you should look at your search engine visibility, metas, links (internal and external), image optimization, existing content, and site speed on both desktop and mobile. This will give you a fuller picture of how your site is performing and what, if anything, could potentially be hindering your search performance. The benefits you can see from tiny adjustments really make a difference when it comes to SEO, so this tip is a biggie.
2. MAINTENANCE MATTERS—DON’T SKIP IT.
Although it’s not the most glamorous task in the world, regular website maintenance is crucial. There’s quite a long list of tasks that need to be completed weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly to ensure your website is running smoothly. Without it, the functionality, security, and appearance of your site can quickly deteriorate, even becoming a security danger to those who click on it. The most critical task is to ensure that you’ve completed all necessary website security updates. Next, you’ll want to check that all pages are loading, forms are operating properly, plugins are updated, and load speed isn’t getting slowed by anything. For more big-picture maintenance, you should look for any outdated content to refresh, review meta titles and descriptions, and above all, ensure that your domain name is reviewed. The list goes on and on. Whew, we’re tired just typing it!
3. CREATE CONSISTENT CONTENT.
So, you have a fabulous website. Now what? We suggest creating and posting consistent monthly content, like blog posts and videos, to make your website work for you. Blog content serves many purposes, but one of the main goals is to increase traffic to your site. The more you post keyword-rich content, the more your site will show up in search and the more visitors you’ll receive. Content creation also helps build credibility in your brand, and it ensures that you always have fresh content to push out in your email marketing programs and on social media. Bottom line: Content is still king.
4. RESEARCH AND IMPLEMENT WEBSITE ADD-ONS.
When you’re confident that your website is operating and looking its best, start researching add-ons you may want to try out. See if a chatbot may be beneficial for your users to help them plan trips, or explore a platform like Shopify to add e-commerce integration into your site. These add-ons can help improve user experience, simplify customer service, and even bring in revenue.
CLIENT SPOTLIGHT: YOUR CRAWLSPACE WEBSITE, REVEALED
The Rawle Murdy team worked closely with our client, Your Crawlspace, to help their business undergo a brand refresh and full redesign of their website. We had a blast writing copy, selecting images, and designing this new site from the ground up (get it?). We even researched and implemented an ecommerce function through Shopify to help grow the company’s B2C side of the business! Now, we’re in full-on maintenance mode, getting busy writing new content and conducting routine updates. Check out the impressive website here.