#1 business resolution for 2023? Improve website performance!

For example:

• Is the site achieving the goals you originally set for it?
• Does it load fast enough?
• What are the Google Analytics telling you?
• Is the visual design attractive and responsive (resizes automatically to any device)?
• Is the written content optimised for Google search and usability?
• Is the navigation user-friendly?

A closer look at website goals

When you built your website, you should have had clear goals and objectives in mind, both macro and micro. Revisit those goals and use analytics to determine whether they are being met. Have they changed since your website was built? Has your audience shifted? Have your audience’s needs changed?
After revisiting and updating your goals, consider the purpose of each page on your site. Does it still meet your audience needs? Does your content trigger the behaviour your business requires to achieve its goals? Is the navigation clear and intuitive? Are there any problems within your organisation that can be solved by altering or adding to your website? You may need to check in with IT and HR as well as sales and marketing to answer these questions. Then you can focus on how to improve website performance.

Accurate and compelling content

Your New Year content audit needs to consider accuracy and whether the content is still meeting your business goals, i.e. is it helping to convert interest into enquiry or sales.
The other biggie is to look at your analytics and see how your pages are ranking for Google search and any others that are relevant to your audience. Search engines feed off high-performing key words and phrases, so every page should have a key word theme that is reflected in the content. Search engines also favour sites that regularly inject new material. Remember, the quality of your words and images reflects your brand as much as the products and services you provide.
Address the high performing content first and make sure it’s completely up-to-date and accurate. Comb through to make sure all links are working. Then assess poorer-performing content to see whether it can be improved or whether it should be removed.
When you have addressed the quantifiable, consider the quality of your brand perception. How do you look compared to your competitors? Does your website represent your persona now? Here’s some ways to enhance your persona:

• Look over your completed jobs this year. Gather information, images and testimonials and use these to create case studies, galleries, news stories and blog posts.
• Is your messaging and tone of voice right for your brand in 2023?
• Is your imagery up-to-date? Be critical of your photographs. Have they been taken by a professional photographer? Do they reflect your company and clients? Are they sufficiently large to display well on a full screen?
• Look at your ‘about us’ page. Is there a new brand story to tell arising from a disruptive year? Remember, honesty about how you are addressing adversity is currently more relatable than endless tales of success. Are the staff profiles and their contact details correct?
• Is there value in delivering the message in different ways? A video, podcast or infographic can be more digestible for some people. While these methods are not as search-engine friendly, they may build your website ranking by being shared because they are more engaging.

Enhancing the technical performance of your website

Technical performance is looking for anomalies that impact on your site’s health, performance and speed. Much like a WOF for your car, an annual inspection will tease out and tidy up any problems.
Missing links, meta data, plugins and the like are best addressed by your web developer, who will also know how to improve website loading speed. While there are plenty of free auditing tools online, these are a broad brush and may not align with your goals. Any problems that are thrown up are best dealt with by the team that created the website.

How to SEO a website

Your website should have been created using solid SEO practices, but optimising your website is not a once-only event. Even if you have worked hard enough to reach the top of organic search listings, you still need to work to maintain your ranking.
Constantly creating new quality content that is valuable to your audience helps Google recognise you and builds your brand reputation at the same time.
Find out what content best meets your users need by researching keywords. Tools like Google Keyword Planner, AHREF, SEMrush or Ubersuggest can give you the metrics for keywords and phrases, including volume and competitive difficulty. The higher the keyword difficulty score, the smaller your chances of ranking for that keyword, so you might need to drill down several layers to find a less competitive phrase. For example, the phrase ‘keyword planning’ has a high search volume, but is also highly competitive. However, if you come up with a more selective key word phrase, there will be less competition, i.e. ‘basic keyword planning for engineering businesses’. Don’t get carried away with keywords; content still needs to feel natural, Google will detect and penalise those who saturate their content with key words (known as ‘keyword stuffing’).
A good copywriter knows how to improve Google search ranking in New Zealand by weaving strong key words into your written content. An experienced web copywriter can also help you plan content, if you are too busy to resource this task internally. Likewise, a good web developer knows how to code so that the right words are given the appropriate weighting. It is a combination of these complementary skills that ensures your website is working hard.
Building links helps too. External links help Google to recognise the focus of your content, while internal links encourage users to stay longer on your website. The more often Google recognises you and your links, the more status your website acquires.
Social media posts are another way to send visitors to your website. You can promote specific products, blogs or news articles. If you are blogging, allowing commenting and sharing increases your reach, but also increases your workload because that all has to be moderated before being published.

Updating website design for aesthetics and usability

It’s one thing to attract more people to your site through optimised content; it’s another thing to make a good visual impression when they arrive.
Put yourself in a visitor’s shoes? Is your website visually attractive and easy to use? Or have you compromised its effectiveness by using an off-the-shelf template that makes your business look like thousands of others? Never underestimate the power of bespoke design to give you website a valuable point of difference. Investing in a web design that is strong and uniquely you helps your business stand out in the crowd.
If you already have a bespoke web design, is it looking dated? The digital communication world changes fast, so a design that was cool five years ago might be looking tired today. While a total website redesign can be complex, there may be small changes you can make in between total overhauls that will quickly update the look of your site. It can be as simple as changing the size of the fonts, the way a menu functions or the position of images.

Where to draw the line between a website refresh and website redesign

While its good practice to keep polishing on your website, if you find you are implementing all of the above at once, then you need to question whether you should be redesigning rather than refreshing.

For an expert opinion on whether your site needs a complete reinvention or a quick fix, contact me today.
It costs nothing to chat and it could make a massive difference to your 2023 web presence.