As business owners, marketers, and employees, we tend to become attached to the things we create. Our company website is usually one of those things. Despite the fact that your website may be under performing, outdated, or unresponsive, you might overvalue the time you put into this project. That’s okay, it happens to all of us. A website redesign is a large task and possibly a big investment, but one that can produce significant returns and help many areas of your business. Let’s take a look at how to start this process and what aspects of a website needs most of your attention.
Content Audit: A Good Starting Point
If you’re a content producing company, then regularly performing content audits can be extremely beneficial. It’s a good idea to make a point of conducting an audit at least twice a year. Regularly performing these audits can allow you to gain deeper insight into what’s working, how content is performing, what content to ditch, and what content needs to be updated. Besides improving your content strategy moving forward, these audits can help you improve the content you already have, such as your website. This makes a content audit a great starting point when considering a website redesign. Objectively assessing your website can help you see things that can be improved, updated, or removed. Here are some common website aspects that should be paid close attention to:
User Experience and Responsiveness
Your website’s user experience and responsiveness feed into the buyer journey and have increasingly become more and more crucial in SEO website success. Things to look out for when auditing this aspect of your website are slow loading speeds, complex layouts, difficult site navigation, and unusable mobile view. A lot of websites are guilty of these faults, and fixing these can boost your lead generation, buyer journey, and customer return. To create a good user experience, focus on the actions you want customers to take and make those prominent on the page along with the important information you want users to remember after they’ve left the site. Using analytics software, such as Matomo, can help you in the future to further improve your UX and continue optimizing your website.
Realign with Marketing Strategy
Throughout the life of a company’s offered service, marketing and sales goals evolve to sell that service better. It’s important that your content and, subsequently, your website match the way your marketing and sales team operate. Making sure your website is working towards specific department goals is crucial to digital marketing success. During your content audit, pay attention to what results your website is aiming towards. If your website is increasing traffic but not generating leads, your sales department won’t reach their goals efficiently.
Realign with Brand
Company values and culture tends to change here and there throughout the lifetime of the business. As generations of employees come and go, market values evolve, and demand changes, so should your brand. Making sure your website is consistent with your brand is essential to digital success. If you’ve recently undergone a re-brand, it would be worthwhile to update your website to match the changes you’ve made. Things to remember when updating your site is that branding isn’t just the look of things, but also includes the voice you use in website copy and messages you send with digital content. You want users to land on your page and immediately know that it’s your company.
Optimizing the Buyer Journey
The buyer journey is one of the key factors in a successful website. Locking down an effective journey can enable your sales team and help your marketing produce content that is in line with your company goals. This website aspect creates a positive impression and provides important information for visitors and prospects. The key to having an effective buyer journey is locking down your buyer personas and effectively moving them through your sales funnel. Knowing your niche includes thorough research of buyer goals and strategy, mapping out a buyer journey, and analyzing what’s working and what’s not.
One of the most effective inbound marketing tools is a well designed and responsive website. A crucial part of achieving this is continually optimizing, updating, and analyzing your website and its performance in your market. If you related to anything in this article, it may be time to consider a website redesign. HeadsUp Marketing specializes in optimizing and updating websites by identifying buyer personas and implementing an effective buyer’s journey. Reach out to us to see how we can help you create a website that works for you!