Web developer Croydon
Explore top-tier website design in Croydon with Smart Cow Marketing. Our expert lead generation and digital marketing at competitive prices can elevate your online presence.
8 ways to refresh your website
Online presence is vital today more than ever and your website should be at the heart of all that you do online. Whether you create social media posts, distribute email marketing or run a PPC campaign, all these digital marketing tactics should lead to one place, your website.
The more links back will help you in search engine results pages. However, you need to take stock and check whether your website is as up to date as you think it should be?
Here’s our tips and quick fixes for an effective website refresh to help engage with visitors and keep them on your website for longer.
1. Is your website easy to navigate?
Check your menu and whether it is easy to navigate. Since you created your website you may have introduced new services and products so does your menu reflect this?
Take a step back and look at your website through the eyes of your target audience, If you find that you reach a few dead ends when you move from page to page now is the time to think about adding in more internal links, calls to action and updating your menu.
2. Review your content, contact details and links
It may sound obvious but is your website content up to date? Does it truly reflect your service offering to your target audience? If you’ve streamlined or added services or products then you need to update your website.
Make sure that all your contact details including social media handles are up to date.
Check that any links you have on your website are working.
3. Add content to a blog
If you already have a blog then great. But when was the last time you added content? A blog or news web page is a great way to add fresh content to your website – which search engines love!
Creating fresh, unique and relevant content for your target audience is a key tactic in any long-term search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. So, get creating!
It may seem a little daunting at first so stick with what you know and talk about how your products and services can solve a challenge for your target audience. Read more on how to write a blog to help you with your content.
If you don’t already have a blog page you should easily be able to create a new page especially if you have a content managed system (CMS) website.
4. Add new images
Are your images a little dated and impacting on your brand? A simple change of banner images is a quick way to inject colour for a visual refresh. And, adding video content can really help with engagement.
You can purchase stock imagery which is a cost-effective solution and ensures that you adhere to copyright rules (do not use Google images as your source, any images online will all carry copyright and you could incur penalties).
5. Backend updates
A website redesign or refresh is all about attracting potential customers to your website and keeping them on your site for longer. So, your SEO strategy is important to help your business be seen online. With that in mind, make sure that you have completed your meta descriptions, H/H2 headers and alt tags to help with website optimisation.
6. Mobile optimised
If you created your website sometime ago, check that it is mobile optimised. View your website on your smart phone and see how it looks. Is the menu visible and contact forms easy to fill out? A website must be mobile friendly as that’s where a lot of web traffic originates so if your site isn’t mobile friendly it could impact your results in organic search.
7. Update and add calls to action
A bold call to action stands out on your page. It guides a prospect in what to do, whether that’s ‘call’, ‘complete our form’, ‘book a meeting’, ‘sign up to our newsletter’, ‘download our eBook’. All these actions not only aid navigation but encourage website users to engage further by taking action.
8. Free website review
Take advantage of Smart Cow Marketing’s free website review to help you on your road to refreshing your website. If you need a hand fixing any issues talk to us and we can provide a quote for a web refresh or discuss options for a new website design.
Web design Croydon
We provide website design services for local businesses in Croydon and across Greater London helping to create high quality responsive websites as well as online marketing services for lead generation.
We create responsive, optimised, Content Managed System (CMS) websites. This gives a lot of flexibility for future blog uploads through to landing page creations for new products or services.
Does a website need a sitemap?
A sitemap is created for a website to provide an overview of the website and what can be found on it. Think of it as a road map with sign posts to help search engines find it and therefore help to attract web visitors.
An sitemap is an important factor for ranking your website in the search engine results pages (SERPs) such as Google. This list of all your webpages helps to give access to web crawlers. Ultimately, a sitemap helps navigation around your website for both visitors and search engines.
Sitemaps allow web developers to list links from the website so that both search engines and people can find a website. A sitemap means that pages such as forms or login pages can also be listed therefore helping search engine crawlers find the pages.
Why easy web navigation helps with SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a key success factor in creating a website. In order to optimise your website, you need to start with the foundations of your website including your sitemap.
The two different sitemaps are XML files (for search engine crawlers) and HTML (for people to improve navigation for visitors).
A search engine optimised sitemap provides easy navigation capability. It means visitors (both search engine and human) should be able to find what they need without having to access multiple web pages.
If a website user can access website information easily, then there is more chance that they will revisit, share the website details and recommend your products or services. This sitemap helps to create this user-friendly experience to attract more web traffic.
When should you develop a sitemap
Ideally, a sitemap should be developed at design stage in collaboration with your web developer. A proposal for a website should reference website optimisation and a sitemap should form part of this.
Our blog on web design guidelines can help you create an attractive website, it covers:
- What functionality the website should have
- Website design considerations
- SEO
- Website security
Website design Croydon
We’re a web developer and designer based in Croydon. We work with local businesses to develop websites that are optimised. We provide a professional web design service to your specification or we can update your current website. We create CMS platform (content management system) websites as this provides an easy option to upload future content and make changes going forward. Book a consultation.
Why not take advantage of our FREE website review so you can look at ways to optimise your website.
Website design and development is part of our overall digital marketing agency services to help businesses improve online presence. Our services include:- SEO audits, SEO strategy, local SEO, social media, email marketing and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.