It is a truth universally acknowledged that a website generally takes about double the amount of time to create than you first think.
Involving far more than the creation of a few attractive pages, your website is, in fact, your online presence. A powerful marketing tool, it must incorporate messaging, positioning and branding; all whilst being user friendly and SEO friendly. No mean feat.
However, once your website is live, it is time to switch up a gear. Instead of designing and strategizing you have to put your hard work into practice and see what is working and what, frankly, needs to change. In truth, this is the secret behind the success of an impactful digital marketing campaign: monitoring and updating. So for your consideration here are some ideas that could help enrich your marketing:
1) Setting up a payment gateway
Not just for e-commerces, a payment gateway can prove to be a far more effectual and practical way of making sure clients pay promptly and securely. Far easier to set up than BACs, and also offering your business a certain amount of calibre and caché, a payment gateway can be a fantastic option if you are struggling with constantly chasing invoices. A simple, cost-effective and worthwhile solution.
2) Analytics
As we mentioned before, having a website is no guarantee that you will convert leads into clients. This means you really need to be carefully monitoring your user journeys to ensure you are attracting clients to your site, and that once there, they are remaining, perusing and ending the journey on the contact us page. If your bounce rate is high or all your visitors are new, it could be time to reconsider and reframe. However, this is only possibly with the right software in place.
3) Back ups
Easily forgotten, this is a little like insurance for your computer. In the sense that it is tremendously important, but you are only likely to invest after the disaster has occurred. However, in this age of cyber hacking and the myriad other ways your computer could potentially go down. It really is tremendously important that you make sure your data is fully backed up, or you risk losing your entire website.
4) Website page design amends
As your business grows and develops, there is little doubt things will change. You may add on a service, expand your team or, perhaps, focus on a specific niche. Often, these are natural decisions that happen gradually over time. However, whilst in your written communication you may well be reflecting these changes, your website may remain static. Which is why it is so pivotal that you constantly check your website and make sure it is in line with your service offering.
5) Health Checks
Health Checks are another vital but often forgotten aspect of website maintenance. Not only are these important for the rather obvious reasons of making sure your website remains safe and secure, but they can also help improve your SEO with health checks often making websites far faster and slicker. A helpful boost in those important Google rankings.
