1) Google My Business
Google My Business is a Google tool that’s super easy to use. It’s designed to help drive your company’s customer engagement, and is a great tool for customer experience and website traffic. Setting this up is fairly simple, and should instantly yield results and help your business convert. What’s more, it’s free!
Google My Business lets you easily read and respond to customer reviews, manage data about your customers and website visitors using Google’s powerful data analytics, and allows you to manage data about your business such as contact details, products, open hours and much more.
What you’ll need to do is setup and verify a Google Business account if you don’t already have one. Then you can get stuck into optimising your Google My Business information. If you’d like a handy guide about how to do this, you can use Google’s.
2) Links
Broken links are a big ‘no-no’ on websites. They’re frustrating for the customer, and Google doesn’t like them. If you want to score an easy win with Google and your customers, you’ll need to make sure your website does not have any broken links. Sounds complicated, but it’s not.
There are plenty of broken link or ‘dead link’ tools out there that are free to use. Just enter your website address into the tool, and it will let you know if you have any dead links. If you have a big website, you may need to pay for the tool. I’ve just googled ‘broken link checker’ and clicked on the first result. The tool is easy to use and it checks 2000 links for free (that’s quite a lot). And hey, it found 5 broken links on the website I entered, so I’ll go and fix those now!
Broken links are penalised by Google, which likes to ‘crawl’ around your website checking out the content. If it finds a broken link… well, it’s like driving a car and turning onto a dead-end street. Spend some time making sure your website has plenty of links, and make sure they work! That is, they take you to the intended destination.
3) Mobile
More and more people are browsing the internet from their mobile phones. In fact, in 2019 around 61% of all organic Google search traffic was done via mobile. This is up from around 54% in 2017… and it’s probably going to keep going up as more and more of us get our hands on a smartphone.
If your website is old then there’s a good chance it’s not built for mobile browsing. What does this mean? Well, if you want a quick website win that will boost traffic and improve the customer experience, you’ll want to make sure people can browse easily from the comfort of their mobile. This means making it easy and quick to navigate on a smaller screen, reducing bulky text and imagery that will put off customers using their mobile.
You can change the way visitors view your website from mobile fairly easily, though you may want someone a bit more tech savvy if you’re not confident in your own website skills.
4) Evergreen
Generating content for your website can be long and boring, but not if you make ‘evergreen’ content. This is an easy website win that will help drive traffic and keep your customers engaged – and it will only require a bit of your time.
If you’re constantly spending your time and energy writing blogs, you’ve got less time to focus on running your business. Less time to focus on your business? Less results from your business. You see? So don’t waste your time writing new content all the time, else you’ll have an amazing blog but no business revenue. Make evergreen content.
Evergreen content is content that is search engine optimised – it has all your relevant keywords for your business – and is relevant for your clients all the year round. Like this! This blog is evergreen. People will always want to know how to score easy wins for their website, and hopefully you find it useful (whenever you’re reading this).
And here’s a sneaky trick… if your blog becomes out of date, don’t be afraid to recycle it and use it as a framework for a new blog post months, or even years later. This will save you loads of time down the line.
5) Media
We love imagery at Vertical Plus. A picture tells a thousand words. Why waste your time and website on bulky paragraphs explaining something, when you could use a picture? This tip is a sure win that will help your website’s performance – it may just require a bit of time and a budget if you need to hire a photographer. And by the way, from our experience, it is definitely worth hiring a photographer for your product and website imagery. Your phone camera probably won’t cut it I’m afraid.
Use imagery to engage and inspire visitors and customers. Good product imagery works wonders and can sell a product on its own. Customers aren’t stupid and can tell the difference between good and bad imagery. Invest in good imagery for your website and you’ll see a great, and near instant Return on Investment.
Media can also include any videos, downloadable resources, graphics, podcasts etc. Make sure they’re up-to-date and professional.
Can’t decide what media to use? We can help. We analyse the performance of various aspects of your website to find the parts that perform the best – imagery included.
Whilst these 5 tips should work – and anyone can do them – do bear in mind that if you want to see real, long-lasting and impactful results from your business’s website, you’ll probably need ecommerce and website experts like us to handle it.
If you’d like to get in touch with Vertical Plus to discuss how a partnership would help to grow your ecommerce sales, please contact us at info@verticalplus.co.uk