Seeing Your Website with Fresh Eyes

The first quarter of the year is a good time to review your website and your total internet marketing program so that you can make any needed changes before the arrival of the biggest season of the year — 4th quarter. If you haven’t done it try, today is the day to begin.

Here are some things to  ask yourself and some tasks to consider doing to make your marketing on the web more effective.

  1. What worked this past year? What didn’t work?
  2. What are your goals for traffic? For sales?   What work  needs to be done to reach those goals?   Is it Blogging?  SEO?  Social Media?  Adding additional content?
  3. It’s a good time of year to test all your links and be sure everything works.
  4. Review your shopping cart process and ensure that it’s quick, easy and efficient for users.
  5. Look at web stats and see if you have a problem with your bounce rate. Have you set up an analytics program so that you can easily see what pages on your site visitors are entering and leaving on and how they found those pages?  If not, Google webmaster tools makes this easy.
  6. Look at jazzing up pages that have a high exit rate and see if you can improve results.
  7. Maybe you want to scrub your mailing list and remove dead addresses. If you are using Mailchimp or a similar mailing program, you can see who has never or rarely opened your emails.  Most mail programs will automatically delete email addresses that are no longer valid for you.
  8. Add some new images and freshen up the website.
  9. Get working on content addition and a plan for Blog posts so that you can blog regularly
  10. Update customer testimonials on the site.
  11. Get active on social media.
  12. Do keyword research and determine if there are new keywords that you could optimize for to increase traffic (keyword research should be done multiple times through the year so you don’t miss out on discovering new keyword opportunities).  Don’t know how to check for keywords? Ubersuggest.com is a free program that helps you find good ones to use.
  13. Once you have those keywords, are you using them in your page title, description, and within the first 100 words of the page.
  14. Review your product and service info. Is the pricing still accurate?  Are the descriptions accurate?  Do you need to increase shipping charges as carriers increase their charges?
  15. Make sure every page has a clear and strong call to action.
  16. Take a few minutes and develop your own list of things you know you should be doing but have put off until you have more time.

    Of course, I know you can’t possibly do all of this at one time.  Once you have your list, prioritize it as to which items are most important.  Then select three of them to work on.

    Once those are done, do three more, etc until you’ve completed the list.  Some of them will be ongoing throughout the year so create a separate list for those items.

    When planning your week, ask yourself:  “What is going to be the one thing that I will work on this week to make my Internet marketing more effective?”

     

     

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