Know your stats!
As we continue to discuss the different elements involved in search engine optimization, it’s important to keep an eye on your website statistics. How many people visit your website each day? How long do they stay on your website? What pages are most popular? Are they finding you via a search engine or direct traffic?
When you host with Old City Web Services, we provide you with access to comprehensive site statistics that will allow you to answer all of the above questions. Knowing the details of your web traffic will allow you to better plan your online marketing campaigns and select advertisements that give you the most traffic.
You can also use statistics to determine why you might not be getting the most out of your website. If visitors are leaving your website after only visiting the home page, you might want to re-assess how user-friendly your website is. Do visitors not know where to go next? Or is your content not giving them a good idea of what else the site has to offer?
If you don’t have trackable statistics on your website yet, Google Analytics is one of the best, most popular programs for tracking your website stats and it’s completely free. Give it a try!
Google will like you more if you use a content management system.
THE PROBLEM: SEARCH ENGINES DON’T LIKE STALE CONTENT.
Every minute of every day, search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing have little cyber spiders crawling through all the pages of the Internet to extract information that goes into the database that we search through when we look for something on a search engine.
It’s incredibly important to them that the information they gather is as up to date and as relevant as possible, so if your website hasn’t been updated since the Clinton administration, the search engines are going to skip right over you. Worse, they’ll start to worry about you. Are you still in business? Do you still offer the same services? If they can’t answer these questions, they don’t want to show your website to people doing searches because it might make them look bad.
THE SOLUTION: CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
In order to help your website come up in the search engines, you need to update your website content at least once every few months. Using a built-in content management system you can accomplish this on your own, or with our help. Your time is valuable and at some points, updating your website is out of the question. That’s where we come in. Whether you have a content management system or not, we can update your website in the blink of an eye, and here are just a few suggestions for where those updates can be made:
1. Seasonal Changes
Change your website text once a quarter by re-writing some of it to reflect seasonal changes. Mention spring specials, summer deals or holiday sales. In addition to the search engines seeing new content, your visitors will also know that your website is up to date because it reflects the current season.
2. Blog.
Blogs can seem scary and time-consuming, but they don’t have to be. All you have to do is post a blog once or twice a month with information relevant to your industry. For example, if you’re a lawyer, you can share recent changes or case studies with your clients to show that you’re staying on top of the latest legal news. We’ll go over some more suggestions for blogging next week in our Blogging 101 post.
3. Company Profile.
If you have an About Us page or something similar, you definitely want to keep it as up to date as possible. Make sure former employees are removed and current employees’ bios are up to date. With a content management system, you can quickly update these profiles and add new staff members to the website, too.
Don’t let the search engines miss you, use a content management system!
Give your text and photos an update with an easy, secure content management system from Old City Web Services. We have affordable solutions to give you the latest technology you need to not just keep your business afloat, but motoring.
Call us today at (904) 829-2772 or send an e-mail to letusmarketyou@oldcity.com.