Is your website ready for the coming months? All around the country, people are making preparations for fall and winter by covering pools, swapping windows, and changing tires. And yet, few business owners and executives are giving thought to prepping their websites for Fall and Winter.
While it’s true that your digital storefront or online office isn’t really affected by the change in climate or temperatures, there are still preparations to be made. After all, most marketers neglect their websites during the summer months, and Fall usually marks an uptick in business. As a result, lots of smaller businesses find themselves playing catch-up when they should be getting more profitable.
So, how do you winterize your business website? Here are some easy tips to help you get started…
Update Your Content and Images
It’s not unusual for the content and images on a website to become outdated during the long summer months. Calendar items promote events that have already passed, employee pages highlight team members who have departed the business, and photos can show old products or locations. Now is the time to take a quick look through your pages and update anything that’s no longer relevant.
Make Sure the Links on Your Site Go Somewhere
Broken links on your website are an annoyance to visitors, and a red flag to Google’s search spiders. However, it’s very easy to move a few content items around and suddenly find you have a few that go nowhere. A quick website audit can help you identify these issues and correct them.
Get Your Holiday Promotions in Place
If you plan on driving online sales or walk-in traffic during the holiday season, now is the time to plan your campaigns and put them into place. That way you can ensure plug-ins, product pages, and other details work the way they’re supposed to. And, you and your web design team won’t have to work until the last minute in November or December.
Stress Test Your Website
It’s a good idea to give your website a simple stress test once in a while. That can be accomplished during a routine audit with simulated visits, ping speed tests, and user interaction tests performed by a professional team. The goal is to find out whether you have any issues with the underlying coding or structure of your site before lots of visitors show up.
Upgrade Your Web Hosting Plan
As web traffic increases, so does the load on the servers your site is stored on. By upgrading your web hosting plan – which can usually be done for a very low monthly or yearly fee – you allow your pages to load faster and handle more bandwidth. It’s the online equivalent of expanding your company’s office or retail store for pennies a square foot.
Create an Editorial Schedule
If you have gotten out of the habit of creating new content for your blog or social media accounts during the slower summer months, now is the time to get back on track. Create an editorial calendar that pushes you to generate articles, infographics, online videos and more. You’ll get attention from fans and readers, as well as increased search engine traffic in the months to come.
Review Your PPC Analytics
Because search traffic slows down for a lot of industries over the summer, marketers slack off when it comes to reviewing their PPC accounts. However, you don’t want to waste money on unprofitable ad campaigns when things are busier, so now is a good time to clean up any errors and optimize your search terms.
The summer lull is over and it’s time to kick your online marketing into a higher gear. If you need help getting your website ready, contact our team of creative professionals today to see how we can help!