We get a lot of clients looking for a new website because theirs is "outdated", but it doesn't have to be that way.
Sometimes a website is truly beyond redemption but often very little effort can extend it’s life for months or even years.
Just like cars, websites depreciate in value as they get older, they start to look dated and get scratches and dings, but also like cars, websites will hold their value far longer with regular maintenance. We’ve assembled the five most common issues that we come across, and how to fix them in under 30 minutes. Read on.
1.
Update stale content
Outdated content is a big turn-off to visitors and search engines alike.
This is at the top of the list for three reasons. Firstly, stale content extremely common. Secondly, it immediately gives the impression that your company isn’t organised. Thirdly, it hurts your search engine rankings – Google likes regularly updated content.
First, read through your whole website. If that takes more than ten to fifteen minutes then you likely have too much content (or you are a global enterprise). Anything older than six months belongs in a news/blog section where Google can crawl it but it won’t clutter up the site for humans.
Next you’ll need some new content – and this can seem like a big job, but really it’s not. The trick is to try to find and edit content rather than write it from scratch.
If you are B2B, check back through your emails to see what’s been going on that is relevant to customers, then rewrite it. If there’s nothing in your emails, check back through your calendar. The chances are that you have done something recently worth sharing.
If you are in retail, create content for an upcoming event or date. You can grab someone else’s content and use it as inspiration or a starting point. It should go without saying that you can’t copy and paste someone else’s work, that is both illegal and unethical.
Finally, grab an image from www.unsplash.com and you’re done. (Protip: good images are more important than relevant images – try one of each and you’ll see).
2.
Get feedback
The people people to tell you how to engage your users, are your users.
There are many ways of getting good feedback from your users, but here we’re only covering the quickest one. Get an account at www.hotjar.com (no, we don’t get any referral kickback, it’s just a good free tool) and set up a single question survey. We recommend limiting it to only one question as you will get many more responses and it won’t annoy your potential customers, but try to ask open-ended questions and let them answer in a free text field as you will get more insight.
In order to gain a better understanding of how to help potential customers you need to come at it from their point of view. “How could we improve our website?” is us-centered and won’t tell you much, if anything. “What single thing would make your job easier at this moment?” is them-centred and indicates you are listening. If users think you are listening, they will be happy to talk.
3.
Check analytics
The people people to tell you how to engage your users, are your users.
The chances are that you have Google Analytics connected to your website but if you don’t then you should change the title of this section to “Install Google Analytics” – you can sign up at analytics.google.com. You don’t need to be a developer to set up it up but it isn’t entirely straightforward so if you want to get this done in under 30 minutes don’t be afraid to get help.
The biggest and most common issue with Google Analytics is that often no one looks at it. Google’s servers have petabytes of data about exactly what people are doing on most of the world’s websites, and half of the time the server is the only thing that ever sees the data.
The power of Google Analytics is truly mind-boggling and managing it is a full-time job for a lot of marketers and data analysts, but we’re doing least-effort for highest-return so we’re going to keep it short and sweet.
Go to reports and look for the box titled “Which pages and screens get the most views?”. You can ignore the first item on the list as it is always the homepage, but have a look at the next five and you will see what your users are most interested in. Now consider how you can make this content easier to access. Can you add some content to the homepage? Can you promote a page in the navigation?
Most users don’t look very hard, so by making the things they are most interested in easier to find you will increase the site’s value to your users.
4.
Research the competition
Quickly test your competitors websites so that you can learn from their mistakes.
There are a lot of statistics on the internet like “on average, users leave a website in under 15 seconds”. These figures are meaningless as there are no average users or average websites, but you can get a rough idea of how long you have to engage with your users by looking up your Average Engagement Time in Google analytics. I just checked a client site – they have exactly 50 seconds.
Next, bribe a friend with coffee and cake, or beer – whatever works, just ensure they are someone with little prior knowledge of your business or your competitors. They need to find out as much as possible about each competitor from the competitors website in that amount of time. After each review, ask them to describe the business offering and take notes.
These notes are now a measure of how good each site is. If they capture a clear description of what the company does and what they offer over and above anyone else, then the website has done it’s job. Use these notes as a guide to what you have to do to get your message across in the same way.
5.
Demote your social media
Quickly test your competitors websites so that you can learn from their mistakes.
Social media is a powerful marketing tool, but it needs to be used strategically. Most companies will put their social links on every page of their website without a moment’s thought – after all social media is a good thing for marketing isn’t it? Well, not always.
Usually the goal of social media is to build brand awareness and drive traffic to your website, in which case linking out from your site to your social channels makes no sense at all. The social media giants have made an artform of attracting users to their platforms and keeping them there. If you send someone to Facebook or Youtube, they aren’t going to come back.
Unless you have good business reasons to drive traffic to social (e.g. your support team mainly uses Twitter) then consider hiding those social links away on a Contact Us page or similar.
Summary
Everything we’ve covered here has one thing in common: the law of diminishing returns. Building a website that acts as a real business driver may take time and effort, but the value of that first 30 minutes of effort usually gives you the greatest return on your time, and half an hour a week done consistently can make serious improvements.
We’re always happy to provide advice and chat through ideas so feel free to get in touch.
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