5 Successful Website Tips

Five Tips for a Maintaining a Successful Website

How old is your website? If its more than 3 years old, chances are that you’re due for a refresh. More importantly, your aging website is probably costing you business, even if it was once a very successful website. Having a website is a key component to your success, but having a modern design that’s safe, secure and easy to navigate on today’s devices makes you stand out.

Google has changed the way they rank websites and just having the right keywords isn’t enough anymore. Updating your website is vitally important because it is often how potential customers find you. Let’s look at the top 5 ways you can keep your website up to date.

1. HTTPS – Website Security

The security of your website should be a top concern. Using an SSL certificate will encript the data being entered into forms on your website. Even more important, Google now uses security (https) as a key metric for ranking your website against your competitors. Even if you just have a simple email subscription form you should probably be protecting that data for you customers.

2. Know Your Goal for Each Page

Website design is ever changing, but it’s always improtant to offer simpler, straight forward access to information about the business, products and services.

Each page on your website should have a single goal. Always keep that in mind, if you’re trying to make a single page do too much nobody will stay long enough to know what it is you’re offering.

Homemade or “cookie cutter” websites from page builders are obvious to users and make your website feel generic and thrown-together.

Unless you a very experienced website designer, you should contract with one to make the best site possible from the onset.

3. Add Fresh Content

Keeping your web content up to date helps build a solid relationship between you and your customers. It gives existing followers a reason to come back and every piece of new content is another opportunity to be found on search engines. Not to mention the “freshness” of your content is used by google in ranking.

Red flags for website visitors include old or outdated contact information, a blog without recent postings, or if the site is not optimized for mobile devices.

These are things that can send of a potential customer away from you and into the arms to your competition.

4. Look Great on Mobile Devices

Most web searches are now coming from mobile devices. Google has been paying attention and ranks websites in part based on their accessibility on mobile. If you’re trying to maximize your visibility, every page of your website needs to be designed to look great on mobile devices.

According to a recent survey of online shopping in the U.S., 79 percent of Americans are shopping online.

These results also suggest that consumers are buying wherever, whenever and however is most convenient to their lifestyle and web browsing habits.

Now more than ever before, it is important to make certain your site mobile accessible, it’s imerative for a successful website.

5. Create Relevant Content

Using the right content in your website is key to bringing new customers to your business. Content marketing generates 3x as many leads as traditional outbound email marketing, and costs 62% less. (Demand Metric)

For a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising you have a chance to create highly relevant content and then ask for contact information for each and every visitor to your website.

Blog postings provide information that is helpful to the customer, related to your business and builds your credibility. This enhances the relationship between the your and your customer, which in turn encourages repeat business. In addition to building customer trust, blog content also allows you to beef up your SEO to increase traffic. If you don’t have the time to write for your business, there are a ton of services that offer help with great content.

Hiring a consultant or service to provide content means you and your employees are free to manage and run the business.

They’re also usually able to create posts for a fraction of the cost of doing it yourself.

A regular and consistent schedule of creating content is the single most valuable thing you can do to grow your business.

Start Now!

Is your current website offers all six of the suggested updates, if so, then you probably have a site that is working for you and not against you. Your site should be focused on the customer’s needs, be easily accessible, contain accurate and interesting content that adds to the customer’s experience. Are there are some areas that you need to address to make the best use of your site? Turn your website into your greatest asset by giving it some a much-needed attention.

Maybe now is time for a facelift?