In the final series of these posts from our most recent seminar on defeating your competition online, we look at another 5 changes you can make which have a big impact in improving the online presence for your business.
This follows on from our posts on increasing visitors to your website, improving the conversion of your website on these visitors, and helping, not hindering your website’s visitors.
We’re looking forward to launching a new seminar in the near future, too, so expect a lot more useful content in improving your website to come!
1. Update your social media profiles
How often do you check your Twitter and Facebook profiles? You may post updates regularly, but if your profile is out of date, you may be missing out on more connections, and more potential customers.
The profiles are often short, but have a big influence on whether people decide to follow your organisation (particularly on Twitter!), which is the first in a journey to converting someone to becoming a paying customer.
And don’t forget to link to your website from your Twitter and Facebook profiles: this is a small but vital change that can help your customers find more about you and your products.
2. Use FAQs to pre-emptively answer common queries
Depending on your business, you may receive a lot of queries from your website which have common answers, such as about product specifications, delivery times and costs, and your returns policy.
A great way to help customers place trust in your business is to create frequently asked questions (FAQ) content to address these queries without inconveniencing your customer by placing a barrier in their way and disrupting.
One thing you can use to inform the FAQ content your website needs is what people are searching for on your website. Do the search queries provide reasonable results? Try searching for the most commonly used phrases (you can find these in tools in Google Analytics); does your website’s own search tool provide relevant results for these? If not, now is a good time to create relevant content!
3. Use relevant page titles
Using relevant page titles can really help your website’s visitors. Compare the two examples here: the first uses the text
Peacock Carter – Home
as a page title, which is not particularly helpful to anyone wanting to know what Peacock Carter does at a glance.
By comparison, the second page title is
Peacock Carter – North East Magento and WordPress web design agency
which gives visitors a better idea of what we do (Magento and WordPress are our key services), and where we’re based.
And, as a bonus, this is more helpful for search engines, too!
4. Use blogs and articles to reinforce your expertise
If you have a blog or news feature on your website, make the most of it! You can use. Be sure to write unique content around your expertise areas (for example, we write about website design): a blog post every week or so is a good way of sharing your expertise and building a reputation for yourself, as well as helping to build your rankings in search engines.
If your website is built with WordPress: good news! It has a blog feature built in to it, so you can usually start blogging straight away.
5. Is your website up to date?
A website is a little like a pet: once you have one, it needs frequent care and attention, or it dies.
Checking your website at frequent intervals (once every month as a minimum) is a good idea and helps you to correct mistakes and address issues before they become bigger. You may find our website audit checklist useful as a guide!
Our audit checklist provides a more comprehensive list, but the basics on your website we’d advise you to check are:
- Does your website list services/products you still offer? Remove any you no longer sell!
- Is the telephone number on your website still work?
- Is the email address on your website still functional?
- Do any contact forms on your website work?
This is the final guide in this series: we’ll be launching a new seminar series shortly with new content to help you improve your website and increase sales shortly!