Give your website some love for Google to love you back.
How often do you update the copy on your home page and product pages or update an old blog? Every 3-6 Months – Great Work. 12 Months or more – your competition may be on your heels and could soon outrank you!
Before you embark on a total overhaul of your online content, let’s put things into perspective – even small tweaks can lead to impressive gains. By scheduling regular reviews and making small incremental changes you’ll keep your website fresh and your customers, stakeholders, and Google happy.
The following advice assumes you have a content management system like WordPress and can make changes to your website.
When making improvements put yourself in your customer’s shoes and judge the quality of your pages through their eyes.
In short (taking note of our own advice) make sure each page on your website:
If most of your focus over the past 6-12 months has been on new blogs and content marketing, it may be time for an audit to see (a) if are there any duplications that could be consolidated and (b) if any new or fresh information contained in the blogs is missing from your core pages.
Over time, it’s very common to create multiple blogs on a single topic, with very similar content. We know that Google prefers quality over quantity, so consolidating blogs is hugely beneficial.
It’s also easy to get carried away publicising new products or features that you want to quickly share via a blog and on social media. But these amazing insights don’t get updated on core pages. A regular audit of your blogs and social posts helps align your messages.
You don’t need specialist tools to review your competitor’s websites, just a pen and paper.
Most businesses focus on the competition they already know, but on the web, your real competition is chosen by Google. To find your online competition you’ll need to search for your business services and compare your content against those appearing at the top of the organic results.
The idea of this exercise is to pinch, borrow and steal ideas which can result in a large to-do list for your own website. Please don’t copy verbatim because Google does not like you doing that! Always create your own copy written in your own tone of voice.
How mobile-friendly is your website? Pick up your mobile phone and check it for yourself! Does it look good, is it easy to read and easy to find information?
This may not be something you can fix yourself and may need help with. However, mobile is often the first experience potential customers have with your website. Google is a Mobile First index and nearly all activity on social media is through mobile devices! Any clicks from social media to your website should be met with a great mobile experience.
site:mywebsite.com
How many of your pages are indexed by Google? Putting “site:” in front of your domain name in Google search will list all indexed pages and show exactly how they are displayed in the search results.
site: mywebsite.com
No, we’ve not gone mad and repeated ourselves! Try with a space between “site:” and your domain name to see what sites are linking to your website. Most will see Facebook, Twitter, Yellow Pages etc. Check that the connected sites have your correct contact information to avoid missing out on potential customers through outdated or inaccurate details.
Is your website set up on Google Search Console, previously known as Google Webmaster Tools? This free tool is for Google to let you know if there are any issues with your site including speed issues, mobile usability or report on any malware. There is also a wealth of information about the keywords your website is showing for.
Your web developers may have Google Search Console already connected and can share it with you.
As a mobile-first index, Google puts a heavy focus on page load speed. You can test your page speed on Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool which provides advice on ways to improve it. https://pagespeed.web.dev/
Whilst there is little you can do without the aid of your developers like caching, minifying script and optimising HTML, the biggest and most common problem is image size
Photos from a smartphone 12-megapixel camera or 4K stock photos are unnecessarily big for a website. Look to resize images used for full width to 1200px wide, and inline blog images to 600px wide. This can save up to 80% on file size compared to 4K images.
If you want to get serious about image compression, you can use a free application for lossless compression like https://imageoptim.com/versions.html ImageOptim on your computer, or convert images to WEBP – but please check your CMS supports WEBP.
Security should be a top priority for any website owner. Any vulnerabilities can be exploited and give hackers access to your site, leading to malware or a data breach. Hackers also inject code that you may not know about to redirect visitors from your website to malicious websites. Protecting your site is as simple as adding a security plugin and keeping your CMS (WordPress/Joomla/Drupal and any third-party plugins updated on a regular or scheduled basis.
Learn more about website maintenance
Everything listed above is something you can do yourself to improve your web presence with little technical expertise. However, if you’re site has been neglected for some time, or you don’t have time or in-house resources, a professional audit of your website is worth considering.
As a leading web agency we use tools to scan for technical issues including broken links, missing titles or descriptions, orphaned pages and much more, all of which could be having a negative effect on your web presence. A keyword analysis will show which pages are doing well, and which ones require the most attention.
If you’re feeling that your website isn’t doing all it can for you, we’d be more than happy to lend a hand! Don’t hesitate to get in touch – let us show you what we can do.
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