Is This the Year You’ll Finally Update Your Website?

Who besides me has promised that 2021 is the year you will finally create a new website? If so, focus on a simple, stable, mobile-friendly design. Think about your navigation; grouping information so users easily can find what they’re looking for.

Easy ways to add videos to your website

Thanks to YouTube, more than 75% of people now are using videos in their marketing. Videos are a great way to promote a new product, introduce a new member of your team or explain a process that can be confusing. One of my clients is rebranding, and we’re doing YouTube advertising using animated explainer and whiteboard videos. These 60-second animated videos have been very successful–our YouTube campaign has doubled our website traffic. I write the scripts and generally map out storyboards before handing these off to our vendor for development. This campaign is proving to be effective and affordable.

For a quick video fix, I’ve been using an application called Promo.com to make short little promotional videos. It’s easy to use—insert images, choose music, add some text, save and upload. They’re snappy and fun.

Forget sales pages; include informational pages

Build some informational pages where you answer questions that customers might have. FAQs have fallen from favor, but I think they’re staging a comeback. They’re most effective if you focus on answering very specific questions. 

Remember that SEO starts with words

Website optimization is based on keywords—the optimal word here is “words”. You have to have words to let Google do its job. I’m a writer, so I always advocate for more good content for landing pages. Will users read these? Maybe not. But content does two things—it helps with SEO and it provides important information about your products/services. Remember to frontload the content on your pages—the most important information belongs in the first few paragraphs. 

Building backlinks has become an important part of an SEO strategy

Backlinks include Yelp, Facebook, LinkedIn, including LinkedIn’s business page, and/or business directories. Google views links from external sites like a vote of confidence. Ask influencers—those who are well-known and respected in their industry with large social media followings–to recommend you in their posts, blogs, etc. This will drive traffic to your site. Influencer marketing in its purest forms involves a budget and paying for these referrals and links, but I’m doing a more modest form of this for one of my nonprofit clients. We’re working with some of our power partners to reference each other in our blogs and social posts. 

Install Google Analytics to track user response

Install Google Analytics so you can start tracking the effectiveness of your efforts. Be patient—it takes some time for Google to start indexing information on your new website. Benefits are cumulative; the longer a campaigns runs, the more benefits you will see. 

A lockdown and a new year—the perfect motivation to update your website presence! Contact me at Top of Mind Marketing. Writers and content marketing specialists.