Your Website is NOT an Evergreen
Friends, I beg of you…check on your website. She’s not OK.
(If she is ok and you have a dedicated marketing person and a devoted web developer, then you don’t technically need to keep reading, but maybe share this with your marketer and web developer.)
Your website, much like that mini cactus you got from your colleague, gives off the illusion of being utterly self-sufficient. A true stand-alone soldier who will just grow and thrive if you set it in one place until you think about it again. If you think about it ever again.
But you must think about it. You must think about it right now. In fact, while you’re reading this, open another browser to your own company website and take a walk with me.
Your website is usually the first point of contact for prospective customers, community partners, potential donors if you are a nonprofit, and your mom and her gossipy friends. If you do not show this digital shingle the love and attention it deserves, you will eventually lose engagement, sales, and possibly brand integrity. Yes, it’s that serious. If your website looks like sh*t, then what must your business look like?
People are judgy. You are. I am. Everyone is out there chomping on the bit to get a piece of you, and it’s not a good piece. In this case, it’s an old piece you haven’t updated since Y2K and you can’t figure out why your once-a-month Instagram posts and once-a-quarter LinkedIn posts aren’t drawing in scores and scores of clients. And how about the one email you sent off around the holidays saying “thank you” to people in your email list?
The point is, all of your marketing efforts are driving people to your website. And let’s say you have a robust social media schedule and following…when people do click on the “Link in bio” for those platforms, it had better take them to a pretty sweet, accurate, secure, user-friendly website. Otherwise, all of that effort on LinkedIn, all of those updates on Google My Business, will fall flat. And chances are, they won’t come back AND they will think that your other platforms are a facade. No matter how much work and consideration you and your team have put into them.
It’s cruel, I know. And it’s true.
“Well, Nichole, I have you beat…my Facebook profile IS my website. I don’t even need a website.”
You still need a website, and what’s more, you need to hire someone immediately to build it out because now people are going to think that you’re cheap, lazy, and possibly seasonal or a straight up scam. Facebook is not your website. Neither is GrubHub or Yelp or Houzz or whatever other industry platform where your profile exists among thousands of others to choose from.
Like you, your website has to work hard and be relevant, reliable, and secure.
Here is just one of many checklists (my absolute favorite thing to create and destroy) for checking in on your website:
Perform regular website audits. Here is a lovely, mostly technical checklist from SEMRush. They are not paying me to write this, but their monthly analytics reports are incredible and hopefully your web developer and marketing folks are using it: https://www.semrush.com/blog/website-audit/
Conduct monthly (or seasonally/quarterly) content reviews and updates. If you’re wondering what SEO is, please read this little ditty from, you guessed it, Google: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide. This is something you and a trusted team member and a third party (not your mom, but maybe a friend you trust and will do it sober and go the extra mile by taking some notes). Maybe your blogs are outdated and you want to give them a refresh, or you have had a pop-up highlighting an event that happened before COVID, or one of your former employees is still featured on your “About” page with a picture of her now-dead basset hound. Get rid of the old, and refresh your content with updated testimonials, photos, featured projects from within the last 6 months, social media platform links, and news and press hits.
Perform regular SEO check-ins. You know those places in your website dashboard for “tags” and “Meta descriptions”? Those should not be blank. Your website has an entire backend that, when fully and properly populated, allows your business to appear more readily in searches. That’s literally what SEO is. Search Engine Optimization. And despite what advertisers and digital gurus tell you, you can’t “buy” your way to the top of search results. I mean, you can, but it won’t last long and it will be VERY expensive. Here is a comprehensive SEO checklist from the folks over at Mailchimp to get you started on your journey. It is a good practice to get into, checking for broken links, missed tag opportunities, keyword analytics, and content descriptors to see that things are lined up, accurate, relevant, and always working in your favor.
Be sure that your website is aligned with your current marketing initiatives.
Backup your website regularly! (Ideally, your web developer should be doing this, along with regular security checks.)