Or as Robert Rose succinctly put it, “Don’t plant your flag on rented land.” And keeping up with all the latest digital promotion innovations is tough. Google changes their algorithm named after another animal and now your paid and organic strategy needs to shift.
I’m not saying to forgo external sites that can promote your content, but investing in the domains you have control is likely more important. You can control what goes on your website, copy, UX, site navigation, and SEO, to name a few. Putting funds towards content syndication, paid social and retargeting campaigns can drive traffic to your site. Unless you have done the true due diligence needed to make your site as useful and intuitive for the visitor, that outside investment to draw an audience in, won’t have the kind of measurement or ROI you are looking for.
A website is like a painting never completed. It’s similar to a living organism that changes and evolves. The current life span of a website is about 18 months, but that doesn’t mean you need a complete redesign.
Taking a look at what your site analytics are can provide great guidance of what you are succeeding at, where you need to improve, and possibly removing content that gets little or no traffic.
When I hear from execs “It’s time to update our website”, it’s time to start asking questions.
First off, understanding the broader business objectives is a good start. Maybe this is a branding update and while colors, fonts, and images get changed, it also could include major changes in page layouts. And the UX might change and with that, like a pebble in a pond, these ripples affect every page.
Or you plan to roll out a SaaS-based product and want to use your website to house enrollment and deployment. It’s not about creating some copy and adding images, but its the whole user experience. Is your website set up for e-commerce transactions? What about education and customer support?
Or maybe you plan to expand presence for a specific industry, like Finance and Accounting. Maybe you already have a dedicated web page or some content offers that speak to this group. What if you need to redesign the main navigation? Or maybe build out targeted web pages by job role? Or by specific areas of finance and accounting like P2P, O2C, R2R?
Or it could be something simple, like adding thank you pages after a form fill. These thank you pages contain related content the audience might be interested in. Or implementing an auto-fill for forms from returning visitors.
Your website is likely the first point of contact for potential customers and it’s worth the ongoing investment to continually test, change and optimize. After all, you own it.
Content in Contexts 