5 Ways to Upgrade Your Website for Fall Marketing

by | Jun 21, 2016 | Marketing

If the National Football League teams just finished their OTA’s can Fall be far away?  Now is the time to upgrade your website for Fall.

Get Organized for Web Marketing

If your business slowed down this summer, now is the time to think about preparing your marketing for Fall. Specifically think about Inbound Marketing, where you get a lot of bang for your buck.

How organized is your website?  Or just as important, how is your website organized?  When visitors come to your site, they are looking for information.  Is your site organized so that visitors can easily find your key content?

Cornerstone content is a technique that the search engines love.  The idea is that when people hit your website they often hit your home page first.  It should show what your business is about with content that describes what your site is all about.  They quickly know if this site has what they need.   This is the basic information that answers visitors’ high level searches.  The cornerstone page(s) then link to more detailed information.  And in turn, the detailed pages link to even more detailed pages.  The search engines also can easily tell what information is here.

For example, BT Digital Marketing focuses on websites, social media and content creation.  Each of these is a cornerstone of our business.   Each has a web page which in turn links to other web pages.  These lower level pages provide greater detail about our cornerstone topics.

Using cornerstone content assures that you stay on target providing information for what your business is about.  It also assures that your visitors will find the information that you want them to have.  And you guide them from basic to greater detail.

Use Images to Break up Text

The average attention span for the ill-focused goldfish is nine seconds.  But a new study from Microsoft concludes that people on the Internet generally lose concentration after eight seconds. The study highlights the effects of a more digitalized lifestyle on our brain.  Long paragraphs without images will make your visitors swim back to the next entry on the search page.  Pertinent images reinforce your message and keep the reader engaged. They also help make the information memorable so that your visitor will return to read more.

Now, before the Fall selling season, might be a good time to search for images.  You can learn how to do an efficient search and identify preferred sources.  You can also save images that will be helpful later.

The Internet has many stock images that are well indexed and free.  Google has an advanced search feature that can help you find these images.  Although it is labeled advanced, it is really quite easy to use.

Sometimes an image provider requests that you recognize the creator of the image.  Giving this attribution is easy and necessary.  For a good explanation of the rationale and methods of attribution go here.

Check Your Content

Your visitors will be looking for information, not a sales pitch.  A strong sales message can make your visitor abandon your web page.  Create content in Stages 1 and 2 of the buyers’ journey that helps them understand their needs and then begin the sales story in early Stage 3.  More information about the type and potential sources of information is available here. 

Make your content easy to read.  Paragraphs should have no more than 5 or 6 lines.  Leave plenty of white space so that visitors are not overwhelmed by text.  Check sentence structure and spelling; you want to make a good impression on your prospect.  We write our content on a site that coaches you on grammar and sentence structure.  Try it out here:  http://www.hemingwayapp.com/.

Get Google’s Approval

While you are working on your site consider improving Search Engine Optimization or SEO.  SEO is a method to assure recognition from Google that helps you rank higher in search results.  While SEO is a complex subject, there are ways to easily build (or revise) your website so that it gets full consideration from Google.  A company called Yoast has a free plugin for WordPress that is fairly easy to install and use but very effective.  The WordPress plugin can be downloaded here with instructions for use here.

Yoast’s plugin will coach you on organizing your WordPress pages and blog posts.  It makes suggestions as you write the text and add images.  Utilizing Yoast’s plugin will improve your rankings.  Add it to your website now.

Begin Monitoring Your Website’s Performance

There’s nothing more gratifying than to see the number of visitors to your website increase.  Understanding how they found you, what pages they lingered over and their path through your site is exciting.  It is also necessary to plan further refinement and expansion.

You should be keeping a list of enhancements for your website.  What is the next feature we should add, what photos should we change out, are there forms we should add for our visitors to request more information?  Monitoring your website will help you prioritize these updates.

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