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Prepare your website for post lockdown (Part 1)

Posted on 13th April 2020 at 10:57

Without a crystal ball there is no way of knowing when the movement restrictions in the UK will be lifted and life will start to get back to normal, but the good news is that if you have a little time on your hands now, there are some things you can be working on to help get your website ready. We have put together a list of 10 things that we would suggest you should review or implement on your website over the next few weeks and here is part 1...

1) Website health check

Yes I know you see the "FREE website health check" or "website audit" advertised everywhere these days but they really can be a very useful tool to help you understand how Google perceives your website and what needs to be done to improve, not only the user experience, but also the visibility of your website on the world wide web. This makes the website health check a great place to start when preparing for the future.

The it'seeze website health check gives results based on 4 main categories as follows:

Overall summary for this website

Quality of content in this website

Effectiveness of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

User Experience

Results are scored out of 100 with easy to understand graphics to show you how your website performs across these and many other areas. See the example below, if you would like it'seeze to provide you with a free website health check then please click here...

2) Review your website SEO

The website health check will help you identify any issues with the effectiveness of Search Engine Optimisation but we also think it's important to be reviewing this every couple of months. The first things to look at are your page headings and descriptions as these are the elements of your website that people will see even before they click through to your website.

Having reviewed 1000s of websites over the last 10 years, the main issues we see are either web designers creating a page heading and description and then just duplicating these across the website, or even worse - creating a page heading and description for the home page and then leaving the other pages empty.

Of course when creating your website, the it'seeze web designers will add the correct information in the right places to make sure your website is correct when it's published.

It'seeze clients can also very easily review and amend these parts of their websites and we have put together a very simple video to show you how here:

3) Review your competitors' websites

Whenever we meet a new client we always have a look at their main competitors' websites to see what may be working and to help find areas where we can make improvements.

While we don't want to get bogged down by what our competitors are doing, it's always good to understand the different techniques and tools that your competitors may be using to help them promote their business in your industry or sector.

It's also a good idea to run a quick Google search for your main search terms at this time as it may throw up a new competitor who you were not aware of but who is starting to become visible.

4) Update your blog

A correctly designed website blog should have a published date attached to every post and while this is great to show people (and Google) that you are an active, progressive company it can also look negative if your blog has not been updated for 6 months. If I had a pound for every time I suggested that clients updated their website blog then I would be sitting on that beach right now.

As we all know Google likes to see new/unique content on your blog mixed with a video, images, and useful internal and external links if possible. We would suggest that a new blog post is added to your website at least once a month.

The great news is that all it'seeze clients on our Max or Shop packages have access to the blog tool as part of their website package so it's just a case of getting started. Here is a short video that shows you how you can start blogging on the it'seeze platform.

5) Ask your clients for testimonials

If you have time, now might be a good opportunity to ask your clients for feedback and testimonials that can be added to your website as well as social media and your Google My Business profile. The benefit of this is that it adds new (unique) content to your website helping with SEO but it also gives you the opportunity to shout about your business.

We would suggest that you spread testimonials across the social platforms as well as your website to get a balance. Google will give more credibility to reviews on Google My Business because they cannot be edited by the business owner.

The it'seeze CMS gives business owners the opportunity to add a comments form to their website so clients can add the feedback directly. If you need help with this please let us know and we will advise. Click here for a great example of this.