What should your website be doing?

All good websites should be structured behind the scenes to be found by search engines. If your site is not appearing on the first pages of search results, there’s likely to be a few issues to review and resolve.

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) – this means making it easy for the search bots and your target clients to find the relevant information. Think about the difference between walking into a messy and disorganised library to find that special book or finding it immediately using an organised system. That’s SEO in a nutshell. Beyond that, the search engines have other ways to organise data such as their algorithms to provide data it considers users want to read.
2. Performance and speed – these are part of SEO factoring and sites that perform better will be nearer the top of the results list. The major search engines are mobile first, which means that your website should be optimised to perform well on a mobile device. Your website should also load quickly to ensure a better user experience.
3. Purpose – what is your website aiming to do? Are you providing information and guidance, selling products or services, or building a community? Is your purpose clear? Have you set this out and made your offer/propositions expressly clear to your reader?
4. Relevant content – what information is held on your site, and does it add value to your reader? Is the information accurate and fact checked? Do people refer to or rely on the information contained on your site? Have you checked for grammatical errors and spelling mistakes?
5. Calls to Action (CTAs) – are readers funnelled to take a step to contact you, complete a form or purchase a product or service? Are these CTAs clear and on each page?
6. Links and traffic – are you linked to your social media channels and are you building a flow of traffic to your site? Do other websites link to your site? Whilst back-link building is bad practice, genuine links from other sites is a positive marker to show trust.
7. Feedback and trust building – do you collect feedback on Google and other trusted review platforms? This is a major factor in website results rankings and should not be overlooked. In addition, consumers are more likely to buy from providers who have received good feedback about the very products and services they are looking to purchase.
8. Keywords – have you planned and structured your keywords to be found by your potential customers? Keywords should be placed behind the scenes in your website framework and throughout your visible content.
9. Brand consistency – does your website look and feel the same across all pages? Have you ensured that the fonts, colours, logo, and style and language used is all consistent? Does your social media and other documents/materials all correspond to your overall branding?
10. Advertising and promotion – have you advertised or promoted your website through the search engines or with social media platforms? Advertising can be costly and if not managed properly, will not perform as expected. It takes time to build an advertising campaign and to see truer results. You’ll need funds to set up and run a campaign and this can cost from £500-£5,000+ per month, depending on your needs and budget. In addition to advertising, are you promoting your website to prospective clients both in-person and online? What are you saying and what are your key messages? What do you want them to find and then what actions should they take when they find the information?

These elements are all vital for you to get right to improve your website’s performance and increase organic traffic. It’s often easier to understand than to implement such changes, and the results of your efforts will take time to populate across the search engines.

Our Fix and Refresh Service is an ideal way to let the experts take care of ensuring your website can perform to its potential. We’ll get under the hood of your site and work on all the essential aspects to make tweaks and changes where needed.