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How to Keep Your Website Fresh

As the year draws to a close, you might want to consider how to keep your website fresh.

Digital marketing is so dynamic. Almost every month, Google rolls out a new update. Your competitors are also coming up with new strategies to bring in more potential clients.

To avoid getting left behind, you need to make sure your website is ready to help you meet your business goals for 2021.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss tips for updating your website. These tips can help improve your search engine rankings, increasing your traffic and generating more leads.

Let’s begin.

Conduct a website audit.

Before you make any changes to your website, you need to conduct a website audit.

A website audit should evaluate your website’s current status, grading factors like SEO, mobile-friendliness, website speed, content, and more.

You need to look into each of these aforementioned factors, so you’ll know what you need to work on before 2021 rolls around.

For example, you might discover that your website is slower than average after conducting a website audit. This could have a huge impact on your business since a slow website affects your search engine rankings and often results in a negative user experience.

If you’re unsure how to get started, we recommend trying SEOptimer, SEO Analyzer, and SEMRush.

SEOPtimer is the most beginner-friendly out of the three, and you might prefer to use it if you have limited experience with digital marketing tools.

The tool’s audit is quite straightforward and easy to understand. It gives your website an overall score and also scores it in several categories, including SEO, Usability, Performance, Social, and Security.

SEO looks at how optimised your website is. It checks if your webpages have title tags and meta descriptions, if they have header tags, and if they use relevant keywords often enough.

It will also tell you which keywords you’re currently ranking for. You might discover that you’re ranking for unexpected but potentially useful keywords. You could then optimise your content and improve your rankings even more.

Usability checks if your device is accessible across all sorts of devices and if it loads quickly. Since the majority of users now access the Internet on mobile phones instead of computers, having a mobile-friendly website is more important than ever.

Social checks if your website is integrated with your social media accounts, making it easy for users to share your content on social media platforms. For example, it checks if your website is connected to your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts.

Lastly, Security checks if your website protects user data and cannot be easily compromised. For example, SEOptimer will deduct points from your Security score if email addresses can be found in plain text on your website.

At the end of the SEOptimer audit, you’ll see a list of recommendations, possible improvements that you can implement on your website.

We recommend taking note of these recommendations. You could then determine which ones will have a major impact on your stats and prioritise them.

Do competitive research.

To improve your rankings, making sure your website is as good as your competitor’s is no longer enough. You have to make sure your website is better.

Doing competitive research is necessary for getting ahead in the digital marketing space. You need to determine who your competitors are, analyse what they’re doing, and come up with a way to create something better.

You’re essentially identifying what’s working for them and applying it to your own website, except this time, you’re adding a little something extra.

The results of your competitive research can serve as an excellent guide for improving your website.

For example, your blog post is currently in the seventh spot for a keyword that could bring in plenty of traffic to your website. Getting into the top three for the said keyword could have a significant impact on your conversion rate and help you generate more leads.

You do a quick Google search and carefully study the top-ranking websites. Here are some of your findings:

• The top-ranking website has a slightly higher domain authority than you.
• All the blog posts in the top three are longer than your blog post.
• Two out of the three blog posts are better optimised than yours. They use headings, alt text for images, and sprinkle the target keyword strategically throughout the content body.

For starters, you could create an action plan to improve your domain authority. You could get links from relevant authority websites, signaling to search engines that users find your content valuable.

You might also consider rewriting your blog post. You could expand on points that the top-ranking blog posts only touched on and add more images and even video. The possibilities are endless.

The main point is, you’re trying to create something better than what’s already topping search engine results pages.

Do keyword research.

Keyword research tells you which keywords potential customers are using to find you. You can then optimise your content to make sure you’re among the top results for these keywords.

The entire process begins with identifying who your target audience is. Try to answer the following questions:

• How old is your target audience?
• Where are they located?
• Where do they spend most of their time online and offline?
• What are their major pain points?
• How can your product or service help these pain points?

After answering the above questions, a picture will begin to emerge. You can then more easily determine which keywords your target audience will use to find you. For example, if you cater to users in a specific area, you can target location-specific keywords.

List down a bunch of keyword ideas. You can then use tools like SEMRush, Ubersuggest, and Ahrefs ideas to find more keywords and to determine which ones are worth targeting.

You should take the following stats into account:

• Keyword Volume – This is how much traffic a keyword gets during a given timeframe.
• Keyword Difficulty – This is how difficult it would be to rank for a keyword. Usually, the higher the keyword difficulty, the more difficult it is to rank for.

At first glance, you might be tempted to go after the keywords with the highest volume. However, you also have to take consider search intent or why a user is searching for something in the first place.

Let’s compare the keywords “how to cook pasta” and “italian food near me”. Clearly, users searching for “how to cook pasta” want to learn while users searching for “italian food near me” are ready to buy something. If you’re an Italian restaurant, it’s obvious which one you should target.

Need help updating your website? Cornerstone Digital is a web development company in Sydney. We’d be glad to help you turn your website from decrepit to dazzling. Call us on (02) 8211 0668 or email us at info@cornerstone-digital.com.au.

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Darlyn Herradura

A self-professed book and digital marketing nerd, Darlyn Herradura focuses on building trust between customers and businesses with the written word. She understands that creating valuable content is the best way to get found online and happily spends her time doing that.