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.

COVID Downtime: A New Website For an Old Client

I’ve been working with a client for nearly ten years, and we’ve taken his old website about as far as it will go. It was built in an ancient program, and we converted it to WordPress eight-plus years ago. There have been a few other Hail Marys along the way. 

Every year we think that this will be “The Year”

Every year we think we’ll be able to build a new website. But we keep getting bumped. The recession killed us. A couple of years ago we came in last behind a monster of an increase in workers comp insurance. Every business owner gets this. This year started out with a bang, but COVID has put a damper on all of our marketing initiatives. Yet we’re actually starting to work on a new website. I’m managing my expectations, but I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to start the new year with a sleek new site.

WordPress brought our site into the 21^st century and made it more accessible

These conversions can work, but the site has remained cantankerous with more than its share of workarounds. My client’s an electrical contractor, so we’ve kept the site updated with fresh contentand images as much as possible. We schedule photoshoots of new projects, and we generally show both before and after images. But it’s challenging. 

Contractors can show off their beautiful cabinets and hardwood floors, their new kitchens and baths. But an electrical contractor? Much more difficult. How do you showcase the wizardry of completely retrofitting the wiring for an older home to accommodate today’s electronics-crazed users so they won’t electrocute themselves? In the early days of LED lighting, I used to point out the unique undercounter or recessed lighting, but now LED is routine.

Look for WordPress themes that are SEO friendly

We’ve selected a WordPress theme that will give us a lot of exposure—today’s themes provide promo modules to highlight company features and/or events as users scroll down the page. They extend the homepage where you can use your keywords. There is a lot of SEO value in these themes. We’re writing case studies of residential and a commercial projects for which we also have good images. We’re rethinking navigation and paying attention to page speed—especially image size. We’ve removed a few old projects that are dated. 

• Images. Those great big graphics that are 5000 pixels? Easily resize to 2000 or less. I generally aim for around 1200. 
• Sliders. Use Less. Or useless. Research shows that people don’t stick around to watch your homepage slide show. Choose one great primary image. Swap it out when you want a change.
• Compress large images with Tinypng. 

My client’s site is 20 years old

I don’t know anyone right now who isn’t in the process of updating his/her website, including me! If COVID’s given you some downtime, this might be the time to start working on a new site. Contact Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and content marketing specialists.