You may have a ‘whizzbang website’, but you can’t just set up a website and ‘live happily ever after’. It’s important that your website becomes a living and breathing extension of your online AND offline activity, so that you keep content fresh and relevant to your target audience. Stale websites produce stale results.
Hello, and thanks for reading my first article, as the newest member of The Social Adviser Team.
So you may think you have an amazing website, but I would say that if you’re not adding new content and refining it regularly, it may not be as amazing as you think (or as successful as it could be).
So many times I have spoken with people who believe that now they have this great looking website, they can sit back and ‘watch the money roll in’… but this just isn’t the case.
There are so many moving parts to a successful website. Take a moment to think about the websites you visit on a daily basis?
One thing I know they really do well is provide you with updated information and engaging relevant content. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t visit these sites regularly or they would cease to be one of your favourite pages.
So having a great website and content is one thing, but what content is engaging your audience? Who are these people? One thing that amazing websites do consistently is understand the people that visit their site. They then use this data to ensure that any content they share is presented in an easy-to-navigate and logical way, suitable for the people they are targeting.
What do you actually know about your current website audience? Why not ‘make every visit count’ and spend some time including and setting up Google Analytics on your website so you can collect the information on who is visiting you, what they are looking for, and how they are getting to your site.
The best thing about Google Analytics is it’s free.
Google offers a free checklist for getting started with this tool yourself, or speak with your web designer on helping you set up Google Analytics on your website.
This starts to become very powerful when you are able to understand user stories and notice trends in your reporting. This will allow you to gather insight and refine the way in which your website looks so you can control the user experience. This will mean you can increase the amount of time visitors spend on your website, building interest in your content and your audience in the process.
So my advice is to first make sure you have Google Analytics installed on your page, and then take the time to understand what it all means. This is the first step in building towards an amazing website which people want to visit over and over again.
One of the easiest ways to make sense of the information that Google Analytics is able to offer is to use a great tool we have come across which presents this data in an easy to understand infographic format. If you already have Google Analytics set up, head to Create Visual to check it out and play around with it yourself.
Our belief is, that if you didn’t measure it, it never happened. So whatever you do, make sure you are measuring the relevance of your website. This is the only way you can start to actively improve it over time.
Let me know your thoughts on this blog. I would love you to follow me on Twitter (my Twitter handle is @Comic_Banner) or feel free to leave a comment below.