In digital spaces especially with online store platforms, time moves quickly. If left alone, a great website today could have competitor websites outperform it in no time.
By maintaining your website, you can give customers a great impression of your brand. This will show that you are a credible expert in your niche and will improve website traffic.
Every carefully curated aspect of your image requires maintenance, and there are no exceptions. A website is one of the key ways a business presents itself to the public.
Website maintenance means regularly checking a site to make sure it stays attractive and relevant. Without enough attention, a website can lose its appeal before you realize it.
Making regular improvements to your website avoids task build-up. To make it easier, here are eight ways you can maintain your website. Pin them to your calendar today.
1. Keep It Fresh
The first time a visitor lands on your website, they may be impressed by its quality. If you were to leave the site unattended for a few weeks, though, how often would it evoke the same response?
Websites need to be updated regularly to give users a reason to re-visit. A dead website infers a closed company. Try making design tweaks in line with modern web design trends and creating engaging content to get traffic.
Update your website with fresh content
Blogs and news sections are great ways to keep customers updated. You could look at FAQs in your niche and provide answers through your posts.
SaaS businesses in any VoIP service could address questions like, “What does IVRs stand for?” They could then explain how a virtual business phone system could benefit them. Inform customers of business events, industry definitions, and news to build credibility.
2. Run A Content Audit
You spend the whole year creating and publishing content. Some pieces are a work of art; others are hit-and-miss. To consistently produce high-performing content, keep track of content metrics and review your content. This will make it easier to enact changes that will improve future content marketing campaigns.
To be sure your content is working, schedule content audits once or twice a year to review.
Organize your content and use project management tools to plan, manage, and track the process if working as a team.
Take the time to see how the content on your site aligns with publishing goals. Be sure that your content’s tone gives the right impression for the brand. Tailor your content to the customers so they feel like it is written just for them.
3. Test It Frequently
Your website plays a key role in the way your brand delivers smooth digital interactions to customers, but it is a challenge to maximize the effectiveness of a site over extended periods. Stay on top of behavioral trends and website usability by doing user tests. It will make it easier to develop useful website updates in the future.
Don’t forget to test your site for functionality. Look at how your plugins interact with the site and make sure that all functions work as intended. Does the website respond well on different devices?
In 2019, 53% of internet traffic was on mobile worldwide. By testing your site, you will uncover ways to improve functionality and the customer experience.
4. Optimize Your SEO
What use is a website that is difficult to find? By optimizing your website for search engines, you will be able to increase site visibility and traffic.
Many factors influence your page rankings on Google. How do you use meta descriptions, alt text on images, or internal links to content? If you are making good quality content, on-page SEO will help boost your SERP results.
If you are doing SEO, you should have keywords that your business is ranking for. Consider adding long-tail keywords to the list so you can focus on search intent.
You can find tools that will help you optimize your content by offering checklists of tasks to verify. SEO is a must if you want your website to rank highly on Google and gain more traffic.
Optimize SEO and customers will find you
5. Add Useful Tools and Sticky Content
A company website can do more than make sales. With the right tactics, you can connect to customers when they volunteer their contact details.
There are numerous apps, chatbots, and other tools that allow a business to gather customer information and interact with them. Even an app like facetime would come in handy during these situations. Incorporate tools that will enable you to build deeper relationships with your customers.
Your business can improve the customer experience by employing collaboration software that enables contact center agents to assist customers.
One useful method is cobrowsing. This way, an agent can see what a customer views from their browser window. This is beneficial when needing to guide the customer through a difficult process.
Some businesses will incorporate gamification into their websites and various aspects of their operations. This is unsurprising when 65% of US adults are gamers.
By incorporating game elements into your website, you can generate interest. Some customers will want to play those elements to see what they unlock. Gamification might be a sticky way to deliver content or offer sales promotions to customers.
6. Incorporate Social Channels
Customers typically use multiple channels to interact with a brand or business. Figures show that up to 73% of customers try different platforms when passing through your customer journey.
They will browse a site on desktop or mobile and search for information across social media and different apps. 52% of American adults get their news on Facebook. You can leverage this platform to increase traffic.
Spend some time incorporating social media into your website. Take advantage of publishing and scheduling software to have your content updates posted to your business social channels.
You can also add “share this” buttons around published content for direct engagement. Through business pages on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you can connect to relevant pages on your website.
A business could embed elements from social media platforms on their website too. Add a space for feedback using Facebook integration tools like Trustpilot. By using an external source to collect feedback on your business, you build trust with the customer.
7. Follow Tech Trends
Technological developments often arrive at break-neck speed. With the availability of high-quality new tech, businesses need to be able to follow these trends and adopt new solutions quickly.
Software-defined networks (SDN) are a valuable resource. Often referred to as “cloud”, an SDN can be used to enhance network security for staff working on a website remotely.
Follow technology trends and keep on top of the latest developments
Cloud breakout is an SD-WAN feature that your website will benefit from. Cloud hosting means having dedicated 24-hour servers that can handle large volumes of traffic. Your website will be more reliable and can even load faster.
Another key benefit is cybersecurity. By ensuring your website has solid security, you prevent Google from flagging it as a security risk.
A business should take proactive steps toward web security and data protection. They must make security a priority.
Today, almost every website can gather information on users. SSL certificates enable your site to receive data safely and securely. Upon seeing SSL certificates, customers will know they are browsing your website with confidentiality. This will build trust and lead to more site traffic.
8. Review Website Performance
Use tools like Google Analytics or other analytics plugins to get an accurate overview of your site’s performance. Through analytics, a business can know how a customer lands on their site, the pages they browse, and the terms they search. By adding customer engagement management software, you can also collect data on contact interactions.
Larger websites are more likely to require data quality software. These tools are particularly valuable in harvesting big data for analytics and data mining.
With other data quality tools, a business can collect information from numerous different streams. Most importantly, data quality software can ensure the quality of that data.
Assess the performance of your website by checking analytics at regular times. Through analytics and data mining, it is easier to uncover factors impacting the success and growth of a company website.
These provide insights that lead to decisions in key areas like SEO, content production, and engagements. Refresh your understanding of your site’s performance regularly and you will find areas for growth.
Final Thoughts
A website is the most important marketing tool a business has. It offers customers worldwide a virtual representation of your business. You would regularly maintain your look, house, or car, and a website is no different. With some attention, it could be the highest performing marketing tool available to you, so give it some love and make it grow.
What are some of the ways you maintain your website? Let us know below.
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by John Allen.
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