Businesses adapt and change as they grow, and these changes are often overlooked on your website.
While you may have added another offer and placed it in your website navigation, it’s important to assess how that new product or service alters your overall goals with your user and respond to user behavior.
It may not be a new service but a new goal for your business. Take stock of your goals and see if they are reflected in your current content.
A content makeover is not the same as a new website.
You’ll keep your same CMS and theme and work on what shows up and how users find it.
Read on to learn the specific areas to pay attention to when evaluating your website and determining if it needs a content makeover.
Install Google Analytics
When your website was first created, Google Analytics may not have been installed to assess its performance. Now that your site is up and running, it’s a good time to include that code. If you need help with that, let us know in the comments or contact us directly and we’ll make sure the free Google analytics is working properly.
Having this analytics data is a great way to start a content makeover. Within that data, you will be able to see how your users used your website. This can really shift your focus and show you what users value on.
Analyze social media data
Another great place to check is your social media. If you haven’t been updating it or using some kind of content strategy, don’t worry. While it’s preferable to have those essential bases covered, your account will still be able to show you a bit about how your users perceive you and who is interested in your business.
Look for any keywords relevant to something you offer in the descriptions and biographies of the accounts that follow yours. Now click on your accounts and start reading! If someone specializes in what they do and shares content about it, you can use your own engagement to help drive the update to your content.
What did your followers like? What did they share the most? If you offer something related to it and you haven’t given it any importance or it’s a new offer, then you should update it so that it’s more prominently available to your users when they land on your home page.
You want to emphasize what you can see that users are interested in. By doing so, you can reduce the number of clicks required before your users land on the desired page within your website.
plum the mess
This is also a great opportunity to remove anything that hasn’t seen traffic or ROI and isn’t essential to your business.
Some business owners don’t even remember what’s on their website after a while, so be sure to read every word on every page in case you have outdated information.
Cluttered browsing is an easy way to discourage users. When it comes to websites, the golden rule of 3 still applies: no more than 3 steps between a user landing on your website and finding what they are looking for. In addition, the page does not take more than 3 seconds to load so that they can find what they are looking for.
If you don’t have them covered, then your website won’t perform as well as it could. Delete what you don’t need and fix that navigation!
Evaluate site performance
Now some technical tips. These will be kept simple, but if you really want to make your website work, contact our web development experts.
The technical and search engine optimization side of websites is much more connected than ever. Google really puts a magnifying glass on your site when evaluating how it will rank.
Even if you have all the on-site SEO signals on your site, they don’t mean as much as performance indicators like bounce rate (how often someone comes to your site and leaves right away) or time on site ( how long they stay on a page once they land on it).
Site performance is key. Look for anything that slows down your website load time. You may be running an outdated plugin, have images that are too large, or load certain code called scripts, which need to be postponed until their content is visible to the user without scrolling.
If you can see that your website is loading slowly but you’re not sure what’s causing it, contact a professional.
Start with a site analysis
Your content makeover shouldn’t be something you fear and it doesn’t have to be painful. Expect it to take weeks or even months and don’t stress about it.
The best place to start when attempting your makeover is with a professional website audit.