By this time, your organisation has already laid out its strategy for 2020. But to fully realise those plans, you need to look into your website’s overall condition.

Why? Because in this internet-focused business landscape, most buying decisions start with an online search. If your website isn’t searchable online, it will affect your company’s performance.

To address this, here are several key website improvements you can implement for the rest of the year to make your business more competitive online.

Quantify your marketing efforts

You’ve probably promoted your website online in some way or another. Maybe you tried using popular search terms or sharing pages on social media.

But your marketing attempts wouldn’t be worth much if you’ve never measured how effective they were. After all, how would you know if something works or not?

Enter website tracking tools (e.g. Google Analytics, Clicky, Crazy Egg). With these in place, you’ll know how visitors are using your website. The data will show what adjustments you need to do, and if your marketing endeavours are successful or otherwise.

If your tracking tool lets you merge marketing automation with visitor tracking, then your site will be even more efficient in 2020.

Solve your audience’s problems

The next time you browse online, try visiting a random company website. More often than not, you’ll be shown what its product or service does – which is fine – but more often than not, you won’t ever see how it solves your problem.

This approach leaves the audience wanting because they need to know how it benefits them.

So instead, produce copy that focuses on how you can help potential customers, and why someone would want to pay for what you’re selling. If you lead with this, your audience will pay attention, increasing your chances to convert them into customers.

But don’t stop there; for every benefit you mention, specify the corresponding emotion a customer will likely feel when they experience what your product or service provides.

Up the quality and consistency of your content

Quality content matters because it:

• Helps you gain more credibility with search engines.
• Provides more value to your visitors.
• Tends to get shared more often on social media.
• Makes your website easier to locate.
• Helps your business stand out in your market.
• Generates more sales for your business.

But what makes quality content anyway? According to digital marketing expert Neil Patel, great content has the following ingredients:

1. It provides practical value to your visitors.
2. It has to be original (i.e. don’t rehash posts).
3. It has a catchy headline (it’s as important as the entire article).
4. It answers your audience’s questions.
5. Its information is accurate.
6. It’s engaging and thought-provoking
7. It has plenty of visual aids (videos, images) to illustrate your point.
8. It’s concise and to the point.
9. It’s consistent – meaning your website needs to be updated regularly.

Here’s the thing: it’s either you produce quality content or you don’t. Admittedly, this isn’t easy to do regularly, but if you don’t, you’re really just wasting time, resources and effort.

If you’re aiming for business growth in 2020, commit to rolling out great content.

Make your website responsive

“Responsive” design means your website displays properly on various devices and screen sizes. The approach hasn’t been around for very long (it was developed in the early 2010s), but it’s become integral today. Why? Consider the following:

• Over 17% of all online traffic is from mobile devices.
• Having a responsive design means you’ll appeal to mobile and desktop users.
• Google said (back in 2015, no less) that mobile-friendliness is a major factor in search results.

So make sure your website is responsive and mobile friendly in 2020. Otherwise, your business will lose out on potential customers.

Speed up your pages

Online users get frustrated easily, especially if a page they’re visiting is loading slowly. They expect to get their content right away, or they’ll just leave.

According to Section.io, page speed directly affects bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who enter the site then leave). Adding just 5 seconds to a page’s load time can increase the site’s bounce rate by about 22%.

The obvious solution here is to speed up your website. You can start with Google’s PageSpeed tools, which can measure your site’s performance and offer suggestions on how to optimise it.

Here are a few tips you can start with:

• Compress your images before uploading them to your site. Image file size is one of the culprits in slowing down websites.
  
• Implement browser caching so that the browser won’t have to reload the entire page that your visitors are looking at.
  
• Reduce server response time by looking for performance bottlenecks (e.g. lack of memory, slow routing) and fixing each.

Crazy Egg has a more comprehensive list to speed up your website.

Start producing more videos

Here’s a fun fact: according to a Wyzowl survey, when video and text are available on the same page, 72% of visitors would rather watch video to learn about a product/service.

It’s not surprising since it’s easier to watch a video than read text.

However, this isn’t to say that the written word is going away; you just need to put more effort in producing videos because your audience prefers them.

Videos are the next frontier of content. Producing more for your website in 2020 will give your organisation a much-needed marketing edge over your competition.

Optimise your conversion

In online marketing, a conversion occurs when a visitor performs a desired action, like completing a form or buying a product/service. So if you’re selling something on your website, its conversions are more important than traffic.

In 2020, optimise your website’s conversion rates by:

1. Measuring the performance of each conversion point (e.g. popup forms, calls to action).
2. Fine-tuning existing conversion points to improve their performance.
3. Introducing new conversion points to further optimise your desired outcomes.

You have several options to go about this, depending on how your website is doing. For instance, you can:

• Simplify your website’s forms to make it easier to accomplish for visitors.
• Use testimonials to provide social proof and develop trust.
• Offer a money-back guarantee to minimise your audience’s risk.

Listen to social media

It’s not enough to post and curate content in social media. To make the most of your social platforms in 2020, monitor your social media channels for customer feedback and mentions of your brand, competitors, or keywords relevant to your company.

“Social listening” comes with a number of compelling benefits:

• It informs you what kind of content your audience is interested in.
• 48% of customers buy from brands responsive on social media.
• It helps you discover new pain points. Learn this early enough and you can be the first to solve the problem.

You can start your social listening push using tools such as Hootsuite, Awario, HubSpot and Sprout Social.

Partner with us

Running a website and implementing such sweeping changes isn’t easy. This will involve plenty of repetitive tasks to ensure that everything is running as it should. For best results, hire a Filipino virtual assistant to help you get more things done – at a fraction of the cost.

But don’t just get any virtual assistant online. After all, hiring the wrong person can hurt your brand, so make sure you do it right. With Remote Workmate, you can reduce hiring risk, boost your productivity, and win back your free time.