There are a lot of ways you can get more out of your website.
This is a list of ideas. Take some time to think about and answer these questions to get the most value from your site.
They are all good ideas. It just depends on how much time you have to put into this and how much money you want to invest.
Evaluate Your Website
The first step is to take a critical look at your website.
- Professional appearance
- Ease of use
- Visitor retention
- Lead generation
- SEO
Professional Appearance
Does your website look professional? Is it incomplete, with pages you meant to get around to, but haven’t? Does it use colors that might not be taken seriously by your target audience?
Ease of Use
Try to find things on your website. Are they easy to find? Are there pages that should be in your menus and aren’t? Or are there links in your menus to pages that never got finished?
Ask someone else to find some things on your site. If they are having problems, don’t explain it. It is not their problem. It is your site. Make your site make sense to users, not just to you.
Visitor Retention
If people cannot find what they want on your site easily, they will immediately move on to a different site. People don’t give it much time at all.
Once site visitors have read a page, they should be presented with suggestions of other pages to read or another action to take.
Lead Generation
Is it easy for site visitors to contact you or ask to be contacted? Even if this is not part of your business model, you still might want a way to re-contact a site visitor.
Is there a way for site visitors to sign up for a newsletter or to be notified when you add more information to your site? Invite site visitors to follow you on Social Media.
SEO, Search Engine Optimization
Do the words that are used on your site work for both site visitors and Search Engines? After your site has been up for a while, reevaluate your content.
Reevaluate Your SEO Keywords >
Target Visitors
Who are your target visitors? Take some time and make a list of who will use your product or service and why.
Will your site visitor be searching for themselves? Or will they be doing research for a different decision maker?
Are they finding the information they need on your site easily?
Does the site appeal to them?
Is there a landing page for each potential customer?
Back Links
Ask for links to your site from anyone and everyone you can think of with a website. Local is best.
Just email and ask. Ask when you talk to people. Check and see if they did, then remind them nicely.
Make it easy for them by giving them a couple of examples of wording to use. Make the words fit their site. Make it easy for them to just copy and paste. Suggest the page on their site you think would work to link to you. Offer to link to their site and ask if they have a preference on the wording. Don’t use the exact same wording for every email you send out. Take some time to make it specific.
Articles
Write an article on a topic of interest to your target market and get it published in a local paper or magazine. Free advertising.
Market articles to websites that publish these. This is a good way to get links back to your site.
Follow the editorial guidelines by each article directory.
Don’t write the same thing every time. Remember your key words. Key words on a page linking to your site raise your own site’s ranking for those words.
Blog
If you don’t already have a blog, start one.
If you have multiple people with writing skills working with you, perhaps you can take turns writing so that articles can be added to the blog regularly.
Make sure that what you write is actually about things that someone who would be your customer is interested in.
Write in Word. Check your spelling and grammar.