3 Key New Year’s Resolutions for your Website

Develop a Strategy

Spend time assessing the content on your website. You need to evaluate and understand the content assets that you have – this means the text, the images, multimedia files and more. By undertaking a content inventory, you are able to identify any strengths or weaknesses that your site has, and any gaps that may exist. A content inventory is the precursor to a content audit, and is often overlooked and sidestepped, which devalues the effectiveness of your audit: fail to prepare and prepare to fail.

Document whether you have optimised meta descriptions, and whether each of the assets are attracting the targeted audience. This is not a subjective exercise, but rather a simple checklist that you can use to identify any failings. You now have a blueprint for developing your strategy.

Maximise your SEO

Don’t forget that your content goals are your SEO goals: the two go hand in hand. You will need to curate content that is optimised in terms of SEO to help drive organic visitors to your website.

One way that Google is measuring your site’s relevance is by the dwell time that your visitors stay on your pages – if they quickly leave the page, Google interprets the website as low quality. One way of encouraging visitors to remain on your page for longer is by increasing the length of the content that you are providing, but this does not mean a thousand words of heavy text; instead, incorporate infographics, images and bullet points so that the information you provide is more digestible.

Your content must include outbound linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. to other sites so that Google can work out the topic of your site. This feels counterintuitive to be directing your visitors to other sites, but it helps Google establish the relevancy of your page. These links do not have to be to competitors, but rather to quality sites that support your content.

Embrace the Analytics

It is easy to set yourself goals, but not so easy to achieve them, and without implementing quantitative methods for measuring your progress, you will not know whether you are on the right track. The majority of businesses focus on the number of visitors to the website, the number of followers on social media platforms, and their website’s rankings on Google; however, these can be considered vanity metrics. You need to delve deeper into the data you have, and amend your metrics and KPIs to measure the number of sales generated per tweet, for example, or how many visitors to your website convert to sales, or the cart abandonment rate. This is how you can embrace the analytics and truly measure your success. It is also key to identifying areas in which you need to improve on.

Image courtesy of: webtechexpert.in