- Image by HubSpot via Flickr
In trying times, many businesses rightly try to save money where they can. One of the areas that possibly suffers most in a downturn, is the company website.
This is a real shame (of course I’d say that right), especially since your website is possibly the most cost effective tool that you have at your disposal to help promote your business. And of course, if you decided to invest in a content management system, updating your website shouldn’t be too much hassle!
But what if you don’t have a CMS or you think your website is starting to look a little dated? A lot of companies think that by making “a few amendments” of their homepage will suffice. Generally they don’t understand the amount of work involved and they certainly don’t know how useful it will be when it’s all done. Unfortunately, making even the smallest amendments aren’t that straight forward. In fact, it can sometimes take longer to create a new homepage design with your additions than it was to create your homepage design in the first place!
Regardless of this, it must be noted that improving your website is not all about your homepage. We see this question on a regular basis:
“why does Google show my inside page when I search for X and not my homepage”
The simple answer is that Google will show the most relevant result to the search query performed. So therefore, if your contact page has more relevant information to the query, it will display this page above your homepage (in the majority of cases). For this reason, it is essential that you treat EVERY page as a landing page and not just your homepage.
If you thought you were doing an excellent job by creating many strong call to actions on your homepage, think again. You must include these call to actions on your inside pages too. You simply can’t tell where the user will land on your website after finding your website in the search engines. Of course, by studying your website statistics, you can see where people are coming from and what pages they are landing on after they have found you for a particular search. You should use these statistics to improve your call to actions on those landing pages.
So the next time you plan to make a “few small amendments”, try thinking of the bigger picture and how very likely it will be that you will have to make a lot more than just changes to your homepage!
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