SPRING IS HERE – TIME TO SPRING CLEAN YOUR WEB MARKETING

Having out of date information visible to your customers or potential customers can turn your customers off from continuing to trade with you and can prevent new customers from contacting you.

Here’s what to check for the annual “spring clean”…

Getting value for money for your time spent each working hour can be difficult – the pull of having to work “in your business” vs. working “on your business” is often hard to reconcile.

The effectiveness of any marketing falls off over time – so a refresh and revisit of what you are doing for web marketing should even increase the returns from it.

Start off by looking at your web sites pages – especially the “About”, “Team” and “Contact” pages.

When were the last updates done…? Are the details still correct…?

These pages are typically static in nature – that is – they don’t change much over time but could contain out of date information.

Then look at your “News” and any “Calendar” pages – these often change frequently (or at least should change often for visitors to get the most value from them ;-)

When were they last updated…? Any out of date information or reference to passed events…? Perhaps it’s time to add new events or new news items.

Now check your “calls to action” on your web site – this should include testing any fill-in forms, emails or contact phone numbers – do this to make sure that you are still receiving the information from the web site.

We have many people that change emails so it always pays to check them at least once per year.

Next on your spring clean list is to check your links on your web site – we use a program called Xenu (see http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) or you can try an online link checker such as: -

www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-checker.shtml

or: -

http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/

Fix the links or delete any links to nonexistent pages on other web sites.

Next on the list is to view your social media items – view your Facebook Business Page and click the “Insights” link to see the various statistics that has been happening.

You may wish to check your “Notifications” and either delete them all or respond to those that need it.

Also go to your Twitter page and check the number of friends and perhaps use a tool such as http://www.friendorfollow.com/ or http://www.refollow.com/

Once you’ve done all that – check how your online marketing is performing via Google Analytics for your web site – ensure that the pages that are getting traffic are your “pitch” pages and that your “calls to action” are placed on the most popular pages.

Check how people are arriving at your web sites (note traffic sources such as referring sites, social media and search engines)

Also test where your web site and social media items are appearing in the search results for the terms you want to be found under.

Note which of your pages are displayed for the various key words and edit the pages to get a better ranking – or add new content to capture those key phrases that you are not doing well in.

View your competitor’s pages and use the “view source” in your browser (use the control key and U) to view their source code of the page to gain insights into what terms they are using to search engine optimise their pages.

While you are in spring cleaning mode – view your Inbox Emails and set up any new rules to automatically place new incoming emails into folders for actioning later.

Also unsubscribe from any Newsletters that you haven’t enjoyed reading or got value from (hopefully not this one…) and print and save any emails that have usernames or passwords in them to keep them safe.

A good thing to do while you are in clean up mode is to search for large files on your computer and delete any that you no longer need.

You may also want to run through the list of programs installed on your computer and remove any that haven’t been used in awhile – but be cautious as the “Last used date” can be misleading.

Let us know if you’d like us to undertake a web site audit of your web site and also to give the search engine optimisation a nice spring tweak…