Click or Tweet: Is Your Online Presence Scaring off Customers?

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Spooky season is upon us, so let’s have a little fun as we consider a seriously scary prospect: what if your website isn’t working hard enough for your business? We dive into some spooky elements of digital marketing to highlight eight important aspects of your online presence.

1. Architecture: The skeleton of your website

The architecture of your website is a fundamental part of good SEO and usability. If your website is a little old and its bones are creaking, perhaps it’s due an upgrade. Or, if the knee bone is connected to the neck bone and not the thigh bone as it should be, your users may be having some trouble getting around. Time to get your skull in gear and carry out some CRO, or reconsider your internal linking, menus or breadcrumbs, perhaps?

2. Content: How effective are your web pages?

Unlike my house, I want as many webs as possible in my marketing strategy – web pages, that is. Google loves new content and so do your users, so it’s important to have a content calendar for creating regular new pages such as blog posts. The more content you have, the more opportunities you have to sell and to increase brand visibility, especially for those important keywords. But of course, it’s not just quantity that’s important – the quality of your content is even more essential to your success.

While we’re on the subject of webs, if you’re dusting off the cobwebs on your old content, it may be time to repurpose it. Could you breathe new life into it by updating the information in the post, or by resharing it on social media?

3. Site indexing: Are there spiders on your website?

Again, I don’t want spiders in my house but I very much want them on my website. That’s because these are Google’s spiders – as well as spiders for other search engines – and they are essential for appearing in SERPs. Make sure there’s nothing in your robots.txt file (we’ll deal with the robot uprising another time) that is preventing spiders from crawling the pages you want them to. You can also check Google Search Console regularly for any crawl errors. Submitting a sitemap can also help.

4. Analytics: How many eyeballs are on your site?

Slightly gross eyeball imagery aside, Google Analytics is one of the best ways to see how many people are on your website in real-time, how many visits you’ve had over a certain period, which channels the traffic is coming from, how many of those people have made a purchase, and much more. Take a look at Carey’s recent, very comprehensive blog post on analytics tools for your website, paid search, social media and more.

5. Social media: Are your social followers in for a treat?

Trick or tweet? Social media is now a huge landscape, and the good news is that you don’t have to be everywhere – and certainly shouldn’t spread yourself too thin. Instead, concentrate your efforts on one or two platforms where you know your users will be, create a proper strategy for your content, set some goals, and engage in meaningful conversations with your followers.

6. Ethical SEO: Witch hat are your SEOs wearing?

Black hat, white hat, or a witch’s hat? The days where black hat SEO paid off are long gone, and at SilverDisc we firmly believe in the importance of ethical SEO. That means no hiding keywords by making them the same colour as your background, no misleading users about the website they are going to, or anything else you can think of to try to trick Google into giving you an undeserved higher ranking. Black hat tactics are not only outdated but they simply won’t work, and even ethical but old methods such as keyword stuffing won’t get you far. So it’s not only important to be ethical with your SEO, but to stay up to date with the latest guidance from Google and news from the industry.

7. Email marketing: Are you ghosting your customers?

If your customers have signed up to your newsletter, they want to hear from you – so don’t ignore them, or worse, abandon your email strategy for months or years and suddenly reappear like the ghost of opt-ins past when your users have forgotten who you are. If you’re going to do email marketing, invest time and energy into it, send out communications regularly, and ensure everything you send out has a clear purpose and call to action.

8. User experience: Is your website the walking dead?

Back in 2014, I asked if your website was the walking dead – inspired, of course, by the television show of the same name. Look back on this zombie-themed article for a reminder of the unpleasant qualities zombies have that your website most certainly should not share.

If you would like a hand with making your website less like a haunted house and more like a stroll in the park with a pumpkin-spiced latte and orange leaves crunching underfoot, we’re here to help all year round. Get in touch with SilverDisc today!