Let’s start from the beginning…
There was a time when everything was much more simple. Start your business name with A (or the clever ones AA or AAA) and place a listing in the Yellow Pages. Huzzah, you start getting people calling you.
Nowadays of course it’s not that simple. Even in the 10 years I’ve been working in this industry things have changed dramatically. Google’s meteoric rise and with it SEO. Social Media platforms like Facebook and more recently TikTok. AI firms like OpenAI developing rapidly.
So let’s talk about one of the things you do have control over – your website.
In this month’s newsletter we’ll run through why you need a website, why you need to keep it updated and how to monitor its performance.
Why You Need A Website
The whole reason for a website is that it’s a constantly on shop front for your business that anyone, anywhere can visit to learn about what you do. So it makes sense to be constantly updating this with new information about your business and services. New products, new services, new ways of working – tell the world and publicise it.
It’s also highly important to make sure it looks great as it could be the first time people find out about you. There’s no way of knowing how many opportunities you may have lost out on because people found a decades old website that doesn’t work on a mobile phone and then chose your competitor instead. Be assured though, it’s likely more than you’re comfortable with.
Even if you don’t invest in online marketing and your website is just there to look pretty, something you send people to look at to push that sale over the line, then looks are critical. If you walked into your local Waitrose or Sainsbury’s and they had displays with last months deals on but they weren’t available there’d be uproar.
However, an eye-watering 70% of business websites are just left to sit as they are without any updates. This means it’s either not on a priroty list and the owners will be part of the “I’ve never had anything from my website” brigade or there’s just not enough capacity or knowledge within the business to do it.
Here’s How We Can Help
Talk to us about monthly website maintenance. This can cover a wide variety of things including updating your website for you as well as keeping your website files up to date to stop cyber attacks and other problems occuring. Don’t have the capacity to add to your site regularly or update it when you need to, let us do it for you.
“How To” videos – each new website we create now comes with these but we can give you access to our video library of explainer videos showing how you can easily edit and update content.
Website Performance
Google is constantly searching for relevance and especially now that AI is growing so fast. The whole premise of Google is that it’s THE place to go and find something online. It monetises this in an incredibly efficient way as because it’s so popular it can attract advertisers who are willing to pay for their website to skip the queue and be seen at the top of those searches straight away.
In order to stay relevant Google likes to tinker around with their systems which means that something that was working one month may not necessarily work the next, or they’ll introduce a new hoop a website needs to jump through. This is why it’s important to keep up to date and monitor how well your website is performing at least once a month but ideally every two weeks.
Here’s how you can monitor your website performance -> Google PageSpeed Insights.
Click the link, add your full website (or web page) address into the bar and hit “Analyse”. You’ll see something similar to this:
You’ll get 4 x results (green circles in the video) showing:
- Performance – basically how fast or how well your website loads
- Accessibility – are there any problems viewing your web pages
- Best Practices – is there anything you can improve on technically
- SEO – how well optimised your site is for search engines
If the 4 x circles aren’t green (orange or red) then it means your website may be out of date or require help to bring it up to speed. If the circles aren’t green then it’s also likely this is contributing to your website not being found in searches.
What’s also important is the page loading speed. Whether your website is being found through search or someone has clicked on a link from social media or an email, the time your website takes to load on their phone or computer is critical. People get bored after a few seconds and are likely not to bother waiting for your site to load which means you’re missing out on opportunities.
In the PageSpeed Insights check the Speed Index score (this is the time it takes for your website to become visible). If the colour of this statistic is yellow or red then there’s a problem and it’s something that needs to be fixed.
As part of our website maintenance we can do this for you and make sure your website is running smoothly even after Google changes its algorithms.
See any problems? Contact us and we’ll take a look.
What’s Next?
Found this information helpful and informative, great! We aim to send this newsletter out once a month with helpful advice and tips.
If there’s a topic you’d like us to cover or have any questions please get in touch.
