With the start of a new year comes new goals and initiatives for most companies. In recent years, companies heavily rely on digital means of interaction and communication. That means directing both existing and potential customers to your website. Is your website the best it can be to meet your customers’ demands?
If it’s not already on your calendar, add website optimization to your marketing plan for the new year.
Why Should You Optimize Your Business Website?
Optimizing your website is not only important for your business to be found via search engines, but it also helps your visitors navigate your site with a good user experience and successfully accomplish what they set out to do and what you want them to do (or in marketing lingo - convert!).
Essentially, the easier you make it for visitors to interact with your content and access your product or service, the greater the chance of conversion.
How Do You Optimize a Business Website?
So what should you do to get started? The best way to start is to take it back-to-basics. Here are three key tips for website optimization to kick off 2022:
Make sure your website performance meets Google Lighthouse standards
If you’re not already familiar with it, Google Lighthouse is an open source tool that can run a report of your website's health based on Google’s Core Web Vitals. Google's Core Web Vitals measure the page experience that you provide to your website visitors based on a variety of metrics.
Website Maintenance Tips - What To Do Now:
To kick off the new year, run a new scan of your website - it only takes a few minutes. You may have had a high score at the start of 2021, but as you’ve added content throughout 2022 and as Google changes their success criteria - your website score could have significantly changed.
Run a website scan at Google's Pagespeed Insights and send the results to your web team (or send your url to LRS and Acquia Optimize for a free scan.)
If you have an internal web team, they can help prioritize the list and plan improvements to your website. No web team? Contact us and we'll help you make a plan.
What to Do Throughout the Year:
Throughout the year, keep an eye on your website performance as part of the Google Lighthouse categories, including accessibility, SEO, and other best practices, such as the file size of images and third-party scripts which are known for slowing down website performance, and ultimately the load time of your website.
Pagespeed is a vital part of an optimized website. The slower your website is to load, the more likely people will bounce from the site? The probability of bounce increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds? (Think With Google, 2021).
How do you do it? You can use Google Search Console for the basics of your website health, or consider investing in a paid service that can send you regular reports. Also, be sure to make time for search engine optimization (SEO). A healthy website means a better user experience - and happy users are more likely to return to your website and become customers.
Double-check your website for broken links & misspellings
This may seem like a simple one, but it is important to the user experience of your site to make sure that all of your links are working and there are no misspellings on your site. It can be extremely frustrating for someone who is interested in your product or service to click on a link that gives them a 404 error or misdirects them.
In addition, misspellings can alter the context and create misunderstandings amongst your website visitors. And ultimately, repeated misspellings and broken links will make your visitors lose trust in your organization, and negatively impact the credibility of your content.
How Do You Easily Check a Website for Broken Links and Misspellings?
The Acquia Optimize team’s top tip is to check for these errors regularly (weekly). It can be a daunting task to do this manually. A website performance optimization tool can easily identify and report these content quality errors. That makes it easier to fix existing content or event content or find errors before the content is published!
Ensure your website look is on-brand & up-to-date
Staying true to your brand, style, and content guidelines is important for your digital presence, as a strong brand can enhance everything from brand awareness to customer loyalty. If you have multiple people maintaining your website, it’s easy for brand quality to slip.
An annual review ensures that all your brand assets are aligned. Think logo, colors, font, graphics, even the tone-of-voice of important text.
Request a free website audit!
Don’t Forget About Your Website Copy!
In addition to checking branding elements, make sure all of your website content is up-to-date and accurate. For example, if you have a new phone number or address for your office, it’s vital that this information be accurate across all pages of your website. Other items that are commonly overlooked when it comes to content updates are employee directories, the formatting of dates, or remembering to remove inactive promotional codes from your website.
Purge outdated content that you don’t need - Still have pdfs from 2014? Meeting minutes from 2017? Think about what content adds value to your users. Remove what doesn’t.
Why Should I Spend Time Updating My Website Content?
The risk of leaving incorrect and outdated information on your website could lead to a loss of engagement on your site, lack of trust in your organization and an overall poor website experience. So remember, it's not enough to define website guidelines - you also need to enforce them to ensure an on-brand and fully-updated website.
Strengthen Your Website Content With these 7 Tips
Happy New Year!
I hope these website optimization strategies will help set your organization on the path to success for the new year. -- Jasmine
At LRS, we partner with Acquia Optimize to provide our clients with superior website accessibility services, website maintenance, SEO, heatmapping and more. Want to see the Acquia Optimize Platform in action? Need help with your website maintenance? Get a free scan of your website to see how your website performs on web accessibility, broken links, misspellings, performance, and more. Contact us to get your free scan.
This is a guest blog post by Jasmine de Guzman, Manager, Revenue Marketing Manager at Acquia Optimize. Acquia Optimize is a SaaS company focused on web governance and accessibility compliance. LRS Web Solutions has partnered with Acquia Optimize since 2019 to improve web accessibility, and improve website management and redesign processes.