Timing Website Updates for Maximum Impact

When you're considering a revamp of your small business website, timing is a very important factor. You want your website to stimulate business effectively, but if your business has any seasonal characteristics, choosing the right time to do a major update is crucial. Your new content needs visitors to read it at a time when they're considering making a purchase or using your services.

For example, a heating and air conditioning business, like the ones listed in the work samples on the left sidebar, has two distinct seasons. Its customers typically start thinking about investing in new furnaces or air conditioners shortly before the season arrives when they will be needed. They're not looking for those products at other times during the year.

The most important issue for scheduling website updates is to have that fresh content and new sales strategies in front of visitors when they are actively looking for your products or services. Since website changes take some to implement and additional time to propagate through the search engine algorithms, getting your website as high in search engine results as possible just as your selling season begins is very important. Here are some suggestions to help that happen:

• Plan Website Changes at Least 6 Months in Advance - A typical website revamp, with fresh content, design changes, and other new features generally takes two or three months to complete, depending on your web designer and content provider. Having your new website at its best position in search engine results means giving your SEO strategies time to work. Six months is a good basic lead time for maximum productivity during your selling season.
• Don't Lose Ground with Changes - While fresh new content and design features can help boost sales, it's important not to lose search engine results gains from the past. Use site metrics analysis to identify strong and weak SEO strategies on your current website, and retain everything that is working. Focus on implementing new SEO strategies where your current website has weaknesses.
• Replace Outdated Content with Fresh Content - Carefully examine your current website and identify any content that is no longer current or is flawed in other ways. A website revamp should always aim at providing new content for visitors to see, while updating and improving existing content. 
• Create Unity on Your Updated Website - Too many small business websites show the results of having a history of different content providers. That can confuse visitors and interfere with your sales strategies. While you're revamping the site, have your content provider refresh old material to make the entire site consistent in voice and strategy. 

A website revamp is a powerful way to improve your search engine results placement and to give new and continuing customers and clients a fresh, current look at your business. With proper planning, excellent site content, and an effective website design, you can expect your new website to outproduce the old one, repaying you well for the cost of the update. Email Me for a free, no-obligation evaluation of your current website's content, or call George Campbell at 651-774-7999. To see examples of my web content, click any of the Work Sample links in the left column of this blog.

The Power of Demographics and Content

   
Who is coming to your business website? Do you have a clear picture of the typical visitor? If not, your content may not be reaching the people it needs to reach. Clues to your visitors' demographics are as close as your current customers. Whether your website is aimed at consumers or other business owners, you can start building a customer or client profile by looking at your current customer and client list. It's a simple step that too few businesses take.

Why does it matter, when it comes to the content of your website? It matters because the writing style, level of diction, vocabulary, and many other factors in your content are important in the process of retaining and converting website visitors into active leads, customers and clients. Experienced content professionals know how to fine-tune the language of your site's content to speak directly to your clients' demographic profile in a way that recognizes them and shows them that you know who they are and what they're looking for. Factors that matter include:

• Age - Your website visitors will fit some age range. It may be a small range or a large one, but discovering what that age range is is important to your content writer. As we all know, different age sectors of the population use different vocabulary and expressions. Your content needs to reflect that, no matter what the age range is.
• Education - Are your customers college-educated, or do they mostly have just a high school diploma? Education is a definite factor in setting the level of diction for your website content. Armed with that information, a professional content writer will tailor your content to suit the audience through careful selection of vocabulary and structure.
• Economic Situation - There is a wide range of economic status in today's society. The economic situation of your targeted population is a powerful factor in what language and tone your content should use. Subtle changes in content will have a big impact on the response of your visitors.
• Gender - If your target demographic is primarily male or female, differences in your website's content can establish a tone that speaks to either group. If your target demographic is mixed, a different approach will be needed. Along the same lines, think about who the decision-makers for your products or services are, and let your professional content provider write directly to them. It can make an important impact on your retention and conversion rate.

There's no simple way to explain how an experienced professional content writer uses your demographic information. It is simple, however, to understand that speaking to your website visitors in language that is suited directly to who they are can spell the difference between reaching them or influencing them to look for another site. Expect any content writer worth his or her salt to inquire into the demographics of your clientele. It's more important than you may think. 

Email Me for a free, no-obligation evaluation of your current website's content, or call George Campbell at 651-774-7999. To see examples of my web content, click any of the Work Sample links in the left column of this blog.

SEO and Content that Retains and Converts

 
Sometimes it seems as though SEO and website content that works to keep visitors on business websites and convert them into customers are at odds with each other. In the quest to make SEO effective in improving search engine rankings, the content on some websites can be almost unreadable. Overuse and poor use of SEO keywords and phrases in website content can definitely interfere with the visitor's experience on the site. What happens then is predictable. The visitor simply clicks the Back button, bounces off the site and returns to the search engine results to find a different site.

There's absolutely no reason for this to happen. A skilled content writer can incorporate an effective range of SEO keywords and phrases into any page's content without making that content boring or confusing. While creating compelling, motivating copy that works to retain and convert visitors, a professional content writer weaves the relevant keywords and phrases into that copy, placing them where they have the highest impact on search engine rankings. Site visitors see top-quality writing that addresses their reasons for coming to the site and helps them understand why that business is the place to go to get the products and services they need. The keywords and key phrases are truly organic to the content. Here are some of the ways this happens:

• Keyword Selection -  Keywords selected for any given page must relate directly to the content on that page. Since visitors may land on any page on your website, targeting keywords that suit the subject of a specific page not only makes SEO sense, but also makes the writing of that content more relevant. Google recognizes that the keyword are relevant to that page's specific goals by relating the keywords to other keywords on the page.
• Understanding Google's Algorithms - An experienced web content copywriter understands how Google's ranking algorithms work. Since Google ignores many common words, word order, and punctuation, a key phrase need not appear exactly, but can appear in a number of ways and still be seen as the same phrase. 
• Keyword & Phrase Placement - A highly skilled web content writer understands the importance of keyword and key phrase placement, and writes accordingly. Using keywords and phrases targeted for the specific content of a page, it's relatively easy to locate those phrases strategically to influence rankings. 
• Keyword Density - Too much repetition of keywords and phrases signals Google that something may be wrong with the content, in terms of usefulness to the site visitor. By incorporating a range of relevant keywords in the content, rather than trying to use a more limited set of keywords, the writer can create compelling marketing content without overuse of any specific keyword or phrase. When it comes to SEO keywords and phrases, more is not always better.
• Keyword Relevance - Today, Google's algorithms are looking for relevance. The proper balance between keywords and phrases and the surrounding explanatory content has become increasingly important as Google fine-tunes its relevance-detecting algorithms. For an expert content writer, this is second nature. The result is content that is useful and informative to the visitor, while presenting a keyword-rich face to Google.

It's a fine balance. The written content on every page of your website must accomplish multiple goals, and must do it seamlessly. First, it has to provide keywords and phrases to be collected by Google. Those keywords and phrases must be positioned and enhanced with enough text to convince Google's algorithms that the content is relevant. Finally, and most importantly, that content must be interesting enough and relevant enough to site visitors to keep them on your page and convince them to take action and become a lead, customer, or client. Only very skilled web content writers can meet all of those goals. Amateurs need not apply.

Email Me for a free, no-obligation evaluation of your current website's content, or call George Campbell at 651-774-7999. To see examples of my web content, check out any of the Work Sample links in the left column of this blog.