During COVID-19: Is Your Website Working for You?

If not, it might be time to pivot.

If you’re a company wondering what you can and should be doing during this unprecedented period in our country and the world– now is the time to look internally at what you can do with your digital marketing to come out ahead of the game later. If you’re experiencing some downtime in your regularly scheduled programming right now, this time during COVID-19 could potentially be your best opportunity to make a shift in your marketing, specifically, your website.

It’s not enough to build a website and forget it. It needs to look valuable and provide information your users are looking for in an easy and meaningful way. You wouldn’t plant a garden and then never water, weed or tend to it again, would you? The same goes for a website. You should be maintaining all the moving parts, including keywords, content, tags, usability and so much more. It’s been said before, and at the risk of sounding cliché, I’m going to repeat it: A website is like a living, breathing thing and requires attention to make it work in an optimal way to grow your business.

Going back to the garden example – there are lots of products on the market that can be used to help your plants thrive, keep weeds at bay and soil rich but none are an easy fix, they all take time. You’ll have to put in the hard work if you want to have a successful harvest. Like those products, there are also certain things that are necessary and that we recommend looking at when planning updates for your website. These include user trends, SEO and content updates.

Dig Into User Trends With Google Analytics & Inspectlet

There are many tools out there that you can take advantage of to see what your user trends are looking like. We suggest starting with the basics – Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is great at showing raw numbers across all of the dimensions you care about. There are a number of useful reports you can pull, including looking deeper into:

• Landing Page behavior – What your users are doing on a specific page of your website, bounce rate, conversions and more.
• Traffic Acquisition – Learn more about where your web traffic is coming from at a high level.
• Conversions report – One of the most important reports might be this one. If making conversions to leads is one of your goals (and we’re guessing it is), this report can give you a little more information about how many conversions your website is seeing.

With the right reports in Google Analytics, you will be able to see what parts of your website are doing well and which could use some improvement. For more great information on the power of Google Analytics head to our blog, The 6 Most Important Reports in Google Analytics.

Another tool that we use often with clients is called Inspectlet. While Google Analytics tells you what your users did, Inspectlet aims to tell you why. It is a program that records users on your website and tracks every mouse scroll, click and key press happening on your website. It’s a great way to get an idea of what is working on your site and what may be lacking.

Things to think about:

• Where are people getting lost?
• Are buttons taking them to the right or wrong place?
• Do they seem to be hunting down information that they can’t find easily?
• Are they repeatedly scrolling up and down?

Taking the time to use products like Google Analytics and Inspectlet will give you a solid in identifying if your website is working at its optimal functionality.

Note: If you want to learn more about specific tools you can use – we put on a webinar last fall called Track All the Things which dives into reporting on a bigger scale.

It’s a Great Time to Focus on SEO and Content

If you’ve done the and research and found that your website could be working harder for you, it’s a great time to consider looking at your SEO. Most websites are built with SEO in mind, but that doesn’t mean it will be perfect from day one. As the needs of your customers change, your keywords and SEO need to follow suit. A website that is updated frequently with new content will be crawled more frequently and better indexed within search engines.

As you know, Google is constantly making changes to its algorithm to improve search for the end-user the best experience and that means your technical SEO has to be up to par as well. It won’t matter how great your content is if search engines are unable to crawl your index your information.

Remember, right now while companies are pivoting and focusing more on online ordering, staying home and relying on virtual spaces for everything from conference calls to happy hours, an updated, informative website is more important than ever.  If you’re unsure that your website is doing the job, get in touch with us, we’d love to help.