12 health checks you can do on your website
Take a little health check of your own site and save yourself money before you engage the services of a professional.
Top Twelve checks you can do yourself:-
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Check if your website is mobile friendly. Most of you will know this but after walking around the London Boat Show chatting to exhibitors, there were many that were totally unaware of this being a lacking feature of their site. There are many ways of doing this with the obvious one being to take a look at it on a mobile phone. The easiest way to check is to enter your site URL by copying and pasting the domain name from your website then entering it into the Google Mobile-Friendly Test site which you can find here at Google Mobile Friendly Test. If your site fails this test, you need to address this problem urgently as it will be affecting your ranking in Google. It might be a simple mobile responsive switch that needs turning on and if you contact your web developer he/she can fix immediately for you. However, in most cases, it is a case of a new website being built.
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Check the site thoroughly for spelling errors. If you are trying to rank for a certain keyword and you have misspelled it, Google will not recognise it. I use Grammarly to correct my typos as I write although you do have to be aware of it using American spellings.
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Check the site for grammar and readability issues. The easier it is to read content, the higher rating it will be given by Google. Long sentences, big words and too much technical jargon/abbreviations will not do you any favours. The content needs to be able to be read and understood by an eleven-year-old. Keep that in mind when you are writing content. If you have a word press site, use Yoast to help you with the readability scoring. Alternatively, you can put your text into an app such as The Hemingway App which will help you make your content more readable.
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Check all the links on your site work. If you have broken links, it will not be easy for people to navigate and when they hit a broken link, they will leave your site and probably never return.
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Check all your social media links work. The majority of the websites belonging to the exhibitors at the London Boat Show had social media pages yet did not have the links on their websites and if they did, they were hidden on the footer of the pages. Your social media icons should be prominent on the header of every page or down the side of every page near the top. They should all work. After all, you want people to follow you, don't you?
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Have share buttons at the footer of every page. If people are scrolling down one of your pages and at the bottom, there are SHARE buttons, they might be inclined to share on their own social media profiles, email to themselves or send to a friend. The share buttons do not have to be limited to the social media pages which you use.
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Do not use capitals. Whilst the odd use of capitals in headings is acceptable, they are not in the general content. Type out two identical paragraphs with one being in caps and then read them both. You will find it takes substantially longer to read the one in capitals. Why then would you want your potential customers to tire of reading your content? Surely the aim is to get the message across as quickly as possible.
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Do not use poor quality images. This again will make someone click off your website. Make sure you tag all your images with relevant keywords. This is done in the back end of your website. These tags do not have to be visible to your web visitors.
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Check every page has at least 300 words on it. Google requires between 250 – 300 words in order to index a page. If you are not indexed, you will not be found for that content in a Google search.
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Content is still King! Content is important for many reasons. Firstly, you need engaging content to share on your social media pages which will, in turn, drive traffic to your website. Secondly, you need content which will be ranked by Google for your search terms. The more relevant content, the increased chances of your site showing up on Google. Thirdly, informative content, demonstrates expertise and potential customers are more likely to buy from a company/person who is an expert in that field. Fourthly, regularly updating your content and adding new blogs & news items will help with your search engine optimisation as Google will be more likely to show your site rather than one that is static with no updates for months or even years.
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Remove old news, prices, events, etc. There is nothing worse (well there probably is but I can not think of it right now) than visiting a website with dates for last year or old price lists for 2016. If an event has passed, remove it. If a price list or course list has dates that have passed change or remove.
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Have your email address listed on the website. I know the reasons why web developers encourage contact forms but I also know that the majority of people will not fill them in. I would rather have a bit of spam and have every potential customer be able to contact me than no spam and over 50% of customers go elsewhere.
There are many more checks you can do yourself but after tackling this little list above, I would recommend that you get someone unattached to the business to go through your site with a fine tooth comb. If you need someone to do this for you, we can help. If you need a web developer to build you a mobile-friendly website, we can help. If you need content for your website, we can help. If you have a great website but need to be making effective use of engaging with your customers and potential customers using social media, WE CAN HELP. Find us at www.spcmarinemarketing.com or contact us
