
18 Mar Website and Content
In the first blog, I covered some of marketing’s fundamentals: audience, brand, and tone of voice. In this one, I move on to look at your website and content and why they are important.
In a digital age, where people tend to research online before they even step foot in an actual bricks and mortar shop or reach out to a business, a website is key to making a good impression. Keeping that website relevant and up to date is paramount for a good online presence.
Your Website – The Essentials
People are exposed to so many different types of websites these days, that it’s hard to know what makes one good. However, you will know instantly when you’re on a ‘bad’ one. Things like slow load time, lack of clear signposting, difficult to read font text/colour, cluttered pages and poor imagery all add up to an inferior experience, which ultimately reflects on the business. A good user experience (UX) will eventually translate to sales/enquiries.
Website structure and navigation is key – especially if you have a lot of different product types. It needs to be intuitive so that the user has a seamless experience. Try not to clutter the menu on the homepage – four to five menu links are ideal. You can use sub-menus to group them or a burger menu if you have lots of different pages.
A good website design and structure often feels familiar, because its followed familiar web conventions, meaning the end user instinctively knows how to navigate it. It’s another reason why hierarchical content structure is necessary to think about. Is the information on your site easy to digest and is it well organised? Visual cues like colour, font size, alignment and movement can help signpost visitors to the right section, easily. This is commonly done through obvious call to action (CTA) buttons like ‘find out more’, ‘add to basket’ etc.
Responsive websites are expected. This means that the design adjusts to the screen size of the device/browser. Google now ranks websites from a mobile first perspective, so a mobile first design that translates well to other screen sizes is an absolute must. This will help you to rank well in search engine result pages (SERPs).
Your branding should be consistent across your site and match your existing marketing collateral – so logo, colour palette, font, and any graphics. Consistency builds brand trust and helps potential clients feel safe.
User Journey
Making it easy for a client to find the right information or product (ring, necklace, bracelet) will help you make conversions (whether that be a contact or a purchase). How many clicks does a visitor have to make to get to a contact page or to add a product to basket, or check out? We live in an impatient society where things can be ordered within a few clicks, so if your checkout process is laborious, people will lose interest!
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea but looking at your website’s analytics through something like Google Analytics or the Developer Dashboard your site is built on will give insight into the health of your site. Things like user pathways, your most clicked pages, your most exited pages, your most read blog, times of day, visitor trends and much more can be used to offer valuable understanding of where needs work. Understanding how your site is performing will help you in knowing which areas to look at, tweak or re-design. For example, on my own site, I know that most traffic from the homepage goes to my Gallery next and the most time is spent on my About page. This allows me to consider the UX on both these pages and what content or changes would be beneficial.
Content
The content on your website is important to both clients and to search engines, and somehow you need to mix the two together! Fundamentally, the on-page content helps you appear in search engines when people are searching for something related to your business. This is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and is arguably at the crux of digital marketing! Understanding what the key words are and how you can leverage on page content (what you see on the page as well as meta descriptions) and your off-page content (social media for example) will reap rewards in the long term.
Alongside page content, you should be uploading fresh, original content to your website at least every 2 months. This is usually in the form of a blog. If not a blog, then you should be editing your page copy or imagery and updating it with anything relevant. It’s all very well having a great site, but if you don’t do any SEO work and update it, Google will start to drop you down the rankings as it looks like the site is dormant.
The Take Aways
Most of the things I’ve touched on here would be handled by a digital marketing and design company, but not everyone can utilise one or knows what to ask, or look for, to understand if they’re doing a good job. Understanding more about what good looks like, will help moving forward. Basic SEO and content creation is more accessible to do yourself and more easily done. Remember your competitor set? What have they blogged about recently? What updates have they made to their site?
In the final blog I will cover social media, image banks and marketing plans and how to best use these tools to your advantage. In the meantime, if you have any questions, do get in touch.
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