Welcome to the final part of our blog series on updating your small business website. At this point, you’ve checked your website for design, content and user experience. You may have a beautiful site that’s up to date, and your users are able to easily find what they need. But your site still isn’t generating the results you want. That’s why in this final part of our blog series, we’re looking at some technical pieces of your site that are easy to overlook.
Technical Considerations
1. You don’t show up in search results
This is a big one. There are a million reasons why you might not be appearing in search engines. Your website might not be optimized with appropriate tags and keywords. Perhaps your local listings are incomplete or incorrect, excluding you from Google’s local search results. Maybe you’re having trouble attracting quality inbound links to your website content.
The bottom line is that if you aren’t at the top of the rankings, you’re missing out on enormous potential traffic. The top three results on a search engine results page capture the majority of clicks, with the top position taking almost 1/3 of all clicks, according to a study from Advanced Web Ranking.
Use a free tool like Rankscanner to help identify your search engine rankings for your key search terms. Search engine optimization is a complex and ever-changing puzzle, so if you’re struggling to rank well, consider talking to an SEO expert.
2. Simple URL structure
URLs help your visitors identify how your site is organized and what content they should expect on a page. While it’s good to have keywords in your URLs, design them so they make sense for human beings first, not search engines. The Infographic below shows the difference between an easy-to-read URL and one that will drive users away.
(Source: Moz)Rule of thumb: keep your URLs short and simple. Also, use hyphens to separate words, rather than plus signs, underscores or spaces.
3. Flash elements
Adobe Flash is a software that was extremely popular on the early web for running videos, animations, and games. Due to security risks, slow performance, and more, Flash is no longer supported on most mobile devices, and many browsers are phasing it out. Notably, Apple was one of the first companies to move away from Flash. Steve Jobs wrote a highly controversial letter on the subject back in 2010, citing reasons why the iPhone, iPad and other devices would not support Flash. Most modern websites are adopting HTML5 and other open standards that do not rely on Adobe’s proprietary software.
So if you still have Flash elements on your site, it’s definitely time for an update.
Here’s a tool to check for Flash.
4. No social links
In today’s highly social media-driven world, social links offer another way for your customers to easily interact with you and share your content. If you have active social media profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., then you should consider including social follow buttons on your homepage and social sharing buttons on your blog posts. Typically, you should put them at the top of the page, the bottom of a post or along the left-hand side for best effect.
Is it time?
Ultimately, your small business website is probably doing some of these things well and some of them not so well. So when is it really time to pull the trigger to make updates?
The good news is, many of these updates can be made to an existing site as part of a regular, ongoing maintenance process. When considering a larger web refresh, ask yourself two questions: am I happy with my current website, and is it generating results for my business?
If you can’t definitively answer “yes” to those questions, it’s definitely time for a small business website update.
Miss any any of the earlier posts in this series? Check out Part 1: Design, Part 2: Content and Part 3: User Experience.
