Does your website need a content makeover?

Businesses adapt and change as they grow and these changes are often overlooked on their website.

While you may have added another offer and placed it in your website navigation, it is important to assess how that new product or service alters your overall goals with your user and to respond to user behavior.

It may not be a new service, but a new goal for your business. Take stock of your goals and see if they are reflected in your current content.

A content makeover is not the same as a new website.

You will keep your same CMS and theme and work on what is displayed and how users find it.

Read on for specific areas to pay attention to when evaluating your website and determining if a content makeover is necessary.

Install Google Analytics

When your website was first created, Google Analytics may not have been installed to evaluate its performance. Now that your site is running, it’s a good time to include that code. If you need help with that, please let us know in the comments or contact us directly and we’ll make sure Google’s free analytics works properly.

Having this analytical data is a great way to start a content makeover. Within that data, you will be able to see how your users used your website. This can really change your focus and show you where users see value.

Social media data analysis

Another great place to check is your social media. If you haven’t updated it or used any kind of content strategy, don’t worry. While having those essential bases covered is highly preferable, your account will still be able to show you a bit about how your users perceive you and who is interested in your business.

Look for any relevant keywords for something you offer in the account descriptions and bios that follow yours. Now click on your accounts and start reading! If someone specializes in what you do and shares content about it, you can use their own engagement to help direct your content update.

What did your followers like? What did they share the most? If you offer something related to it and you have not given it any importance or it is a new offer, then you know to update it so that it is more prominently available to your users when they land on your home page.

You want to emphasize what you can see that users care about. By doing so, you can reduce the number of clicks required before your users reach the desired page within your website.

Plum clutter

This is also a great opportunity to prune anything that has had no traffic or ROI and is not essential to your business.

Some business owners don’t even remember what’s on their website after a while, so be sure to read every word on every page in case you have outdated information.

Cluttered browsing is an easy way to put users off. When it comes to websites, the golden rule of 3 still applies: no more than 3 steps between a user coming to your website and finding what they are looking for. Also, no more than 3 seconds for the page to load so they can find what they’re looking for.

If you don’t have them covered, your website won’t perform as well as it could. Delete what you don’t need and fix that browser!

Evaluate site performance

Now some technical tips. These will be kept simple, but if you really want your website to work, please contact our web development experts.

The technical and search engine optimization side of websites is much more connected than ever. Google really puts a magnifying glass on your site when evaluating how it will rank.

Even if you have all of the on-site SEO signals on your site, they don’t mean as much as performance indicators such as bounce rate (how often someone lands on your site and leaves right away) or time on the site (how long it stays on a page once they landed on it).

Site performance is key. Look for anything that slows down your website loading time. You may be running an outdated plugin, have images that are too large, or are loading certain code called scripts, which should be postponed until its content is visible to the user without scrolling.

If you can see that your website is loading slowly but you are not sure what is causing it, contact a professional.

Start with a site analysis

Your content makeover shouldn’t be something you fear and it doesn’t have to be painful. Expect it to take weeks or even months and don’t worry about it.

The best place to start when trying a makeover is a professional website audit.