Is Your Website Producing or Snoozing?

Follow these Six Steps to Activate Your Website

Paul Provost
President
6P Marketing

Is your website producing new leads, or just sitting around waiting to be found?

Inactive websites are just that: inactive. If your site isn’t updated regularly, search engines will slowly decrease your website’s visibility to prospective clients. Even worse, if your website is inactive, it probably isn’t doing your brand (or sales team) justice.

Most business websites – small business websites in particular – haven’t had a new piece of content added in months or even years. For businesses looking to present themselves as industry leaders, this simply isn’t good enough.

Many business websites even fail to communicate these basics:

• Clear phone # and contact information with an easy to use contact form
• Details on how you work (don’t assume that your clients or prospects understand your company / industry)
• A level of professionalism that is commensurate with the quality of your customers. If you’re seeking high quality clients, you need a high quality website/brand that competes with your direct competitors.

Once you’ve got these basics in place, it’s time to take your site to the next level. Here are six greats ways to activate your website:

1. Develop and Execute a Content Plan
Stagnant content does nothing for search engines or potential customers. Whether you write your own articles or curate content from around the web, show website visitors (and Google) that your website is fresh, active and worth visiting. Try posting every second week to get the hang of it, and then bump it up to weekly or even daily. At the very least, ensure that your company’s team page, service listings and contact info are up-to-date.

2. Ensure Content is Optimized for Search
When you develop your website content, make sure to strike a balance between readability and SEO. Focus on integrating strategic keywords into headlines and articles, and that all images are tagged correctly. On the technical front, your site must be coded professionally and it must work well on all devices. Responsive Website Design has quickly become the new standard.

3. Generate Traffic Through Social Channels
A great way to boost website traffic (and search rankings) is to drive traffic through your company’s social media channels. Start by sharing all new blog posts and company news on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube (if applicable). Add your social media links to email signatures and newsletters to gain traction and always link back to your site. Lastly, incorporate social share features into your website to make it easy for visitors to spread the word.

4. Drive Traffic Through 3rd Party Links
Make sure to include your URL in your Google Places listings and always take advantage of opportunities to create profiles for association websites and other partner sites. If you love blogging, offer to guest blog on relevant industry websites to generate additional link traffic. The more quality links pointing to your website the better.

5. Share Website Updates with Customers & Prospects        
Along with your social media posts, find other creative ways to direct clients, partners and prospects to your website. Utilize email marketing to share your latest and greatest website content with clients or, if you want to go old school, consider sending direct mail pieces with special offers or resources available on your website.

6. Review Website Analytics for Important Insights
Google Analytics enables you to track page views, traffic sources and much more. Review your analytics regularly to gain insights into where your website traffic comes from, what topics are big draws and how visitors browse your site. This data is invaluable when it comes to fine-tuning your content, keywords and the overall flow of your site.

Whether your site is producing or snoozing, there’s always more you can do to improve traffic and the overall website experience.

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