How To Manage Your Website like a Boss

If you’re a small business owner, managing a website can be rather intimidating. It can be daunting to make sense of all the material you want to present to your audience, comb through the array of back-end work, and collect and create quality content to help represent your brand and attract new customers.

Snapshot vs. Documentary

This article will help you being managing your website in a way that tells a compelling narrative, entices consumers toward “next steps,” and helps rank in search results. When approaching website management, there are a few things I find helpful to keep in mind.

1. Your website is a snapshot of your company, not a documentary. Your website is designed to give consumers a taste of your company while leading them to connect further (a call, email, appointment, or other next step depending on your industry and business). Don’t get overwhelmed writing entire essays on every possible product or service you offer. Your job is simply to tell a story that leaves people wanting more.
2. Your website should be just that — a story. Many websites fall into the trap of simply listing products or services. A truly powerful website presents information not as merely factual, but as inspirational. Toward this end, embracing the creative side of web design and management is profoundly effective.
3. Your website is curb appeal. This means that the aesthetics of your site matter. It’s important to leverage the creative components of your website in conjunction with the written text to create an inviting curb appeal that encourages people toward a connection.

Once you have familiarized yourself with the hosting platform your company uses to manage your website, there are a few simple things you can do to optimize your website’s impact on your marketing efforts.

Organized Front Page Experience

One of the most important aspects of managing your website is keeping a sleek, up-to-date front page. Depending on how your website template is set up and the level of customizability your platform offers, there are a few things you can do that will level up the efficacy of your front page experience.

First, keep the menu simple and easy to navigate. Determine 4 or 5 items to include in the main menu and include any further pages in drop-downs beneath them. This helps keep your website content organized and easy for customers to navigate.

Another thing to keep in mind for your front page experience is your “call to action” (CTA). This button should be placed prominently on your front page. Whether your CTA is a “call now” button or a link to an inquiry form, this button should be the driving force of your front page. Placing a button in the center of the screen or the top right hand corner is a great way to attract attention and generating more leads.

Consistent Posting and Keyword Usage

One of the most significant factors that affect how highly your website ranks is relevance. Google uses the term “relevance” to refer to how closely your website offerings align with common searches in your industry.

There are a number of ways to build relevance in order to help your site rank better, but let’s focus on the two easiest to incorporate into your digital strategy: consistency and keyword usage.

When Google’s algorithm crawls websites during a search query, it wants to see websites that consistently post relevant content. Consistency indicates to the algorithm that your site is alive and actively doing business with consumers within the market. There are a number of ways to post on your site, including pictures, blog posts, and videos. Ideally, you should post a mixture of all three consistently.

While you are posting, make sure to include popular keywords within your industry. There are a few ways to do this.

1. Include keywords in all written content. Photo captions can be a great place to include shorter keywords, like “restaurants near me.” Blog posts and video descriptions can be great places to include longer-form keywords, like “Italian sit down restaurants in Tulsa, OK.”
2. Include keywords in alt descriptions and meta-tagged photos. While written content is a great place to talk about common keywords, that’s not the only place to do so. When search engine algorithms crawl your website and come across a digital file like a picture, they need to see alt descriptions and metadata that indicate what the picture is about. Platforms like Adobe Lightroom allow you to include keywords in the actual data description of the file, which helps algorithms find relevance not only in your written content, but also your digital content.
3. Blogs are of particular importance. Blogs are incredibly valuable because they offer a place to include long-form keywords. Long form keywords, while generating fewer searches overall, garner greater conversion due to their specificity. While long form keywords are searched less often, those searching them have a more specific idea of what they’re looking for, thus accelerating the purchase decision making process. Utilize blogs to write content around these keywords.

Utilize Templates

As a business owner or marketing manager, it can be daunting to format a website from scratch. Website building tools like Wix, Wordpress, and Squarespace offer incredible tools and templates to help this process. Apply a template to your website, and work within it. This will not only help ensure aesthetic consistency, but it will save tons of time when you go to post on your website. These templates are fairly customizable, so you can maintain the creative uniqueness of your brand while tapping in to professional-grade aesthetics and formatting templates.

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No matter what industry you’re in, there are a myriad of things you must take care of every day. These tools will help simplify your web management process and create margin to continue crushing it in the field! Additionally, using these steps, you will improve your SEO and create a visually compelling story to draw new customers and engage your clientele. And as always, our team at Tier Level is here to help! Shoot me an email or give me a call using the contact info below for any digital marketing needs!

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Email: ben@tierlevel.com

Cell: 918-219-7428