How to Grow and Care for Your Website
Being a Good Steward
So, you’ve got yourself a website. Maybe it’s brand new, just taken live, or maybe it's been sitting neglected for a couple of years. Whatever the case may be, reading this article is the first step toward investing in long-term avenues of growth for your website. Knowing how to properly care for something as abstract as a website can be overwhelming, but if you’re eager to learn and get help, you’re in the right place!
Basic Website Upkeep & Maintenance
Taking care of your website starts with the bare minimum. Depending on the type of website you have, not all may apply. At the very least, your website should be kept up to date with the latest version of all its themes and plugins. This ensures you have the latest, most efficient code that has the fewest vulnerabilities to attack. Additionally, you should take regular backups of your website, ideally after all updates have succeeded. At least one copy of your backup should be saved to a safe external location in case of emergency. It's a good idea to schedule a recurring maintenance schedule. Depending on the number of content additions/changes made to your website, you might schedule maintenance anywhere from bi-annually to bi-weekly.
If you’re being especially rigorous, your regular maintenance should include an antivirus scan and file audit. This process ensures there aren’t active vulnerabilities exposing your website to cyberattack, as well as checks the website’s files to ensure nothing foreign has been added or important protections haven’t been removed.
Lastly, your regular maintenance should include reference/link/form testing. This means checking every image and hyperlink on the site to ensure they don't reference broken external sites. Ideally each image would be stored in your website’s files, and each hyperlink should be functional. This part also involves checking each submission form and ensuring emails are sent properly to the form submitter and the intended recipient.
Sustaining and Growing Your Website
Basic maintenance, while important, won’t increase your web traffic or footprint. If that is your main goal, you must first consider which kind of traffic you’re looking to bolster: direct or organic. Direct traffic refers to people who go directly to your website via a hyperlink or by typing your web address into their browser. Increasing your direct traffic means you value increasing returning users, or that you have a strong conversion rate. Organic traffic refers to people who find your website via search, typically Google, but there are many other avenues. Targeting an increase in organic traffic means you look to expand your brand’s outreach and capture new markets; it is a process known as Search Engine Optimization.
Increasing Your Website’s Direct Traffic
For some organizations, growing their website means improving its resourcefulness to their clients. This might look like creating new pages where user traffic can be converted into opportunities for you, for example, an online order form, or an online store, or even product documentation. Often this process starts with translating components of your physical business to your online one: taking the services you offer in person and finding ways to provide them online.
Having as many services and avenues for conversion as possible on your website can be very helpful in two major ways: conversion tracking metrics via Google Tag Manager, and/or targeting your ad and referral campaigns. Making your website specific means your marketing drives can be specific. You can leverage your client’s emails to create a mailing list for marketing pushes. You can create custom landing pages to coincide with your marketing campaigns, serving focused information and directing users to exactly what you want them to see. Google Tag Manager is a powerful tool in these approaches, allowing you to track specific conversions and create insights into your visitors and their demographics. Combined with Google AdWords, you can target the most optimal ad placements to increase your conversions.
Search Engine Optimization
For most organizations, growing their website means reaching new demographics and capturing leads from new prospects. Beyond marketing, most new customers will come to you via search methods: Google, Apple Maps, Bing, etc. Each of these search engines abide by basic standards that tell sites how to structure themselves so that they will be listed. Ensuring your site is structured this way is the first step of SEO, often referred to as ‘technical SEO’, but it is only the beginning.
Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing iterative process, combining strategy with the data afforded by Google Analytics to identify new areas of growth, create content that will grow you in that direction, and bolstering your site’s domain authority through interlinking and backlinking. As you optimize your website, you will begin to rank higher in search results, ensuring more prospects find you rather than your competitors.
This of course is not a concern for all websites. For example, if you’re a nonprofit working in your local community, capturing more organic search traffic will have minimal impact. Or alternatively if you’re a business-to-business organization with longstanding relationships or working mostly via referral, the potential to capture new clients via SEO may be low.
Content. Content. Content.
Content is king in the web world. Regardless of your intention, adding content to your website has myriad benefits. You can think of the content on your website as the roots of a tree, where your home and service pages are the trunk, and your contact forms or marketplace the leaves and fruit. Every piece of content you add to the website will enrich the rest of the tree, deepening its roots and allowing it to cover new ground.
Even if you’re unsure what to post, compare with your competitors, see what sets the companies at the top of the search results apart from you, and take inspiration for your own content. Being a good steward of your website will pay dividends, like any investment, so finding the time to invest is crucial.
Abstract is Here to Help
If growing your website is your goal but you lack the time or would prefer industry experts to work for you, Abstract has the capabilities you need. We can work with you to grow and optimize your website, as hands-on or hands-off as you need. You can have the benefits of a full-time development and marketing team with over a decade of industry expertise for a fraction of the cost. We would be eager to discuss what a partnership would look like for you and your organization.