Having a business website is up there on the vast majority of business marketing plans.  You invest in setting one up, even if you go down the do-it-yourself route, in terms of time and money.  Are you capitalizing on that investment and making sure your website is performing to its full potential?

Having a website but doing nothing to maintain it is just like having a flashy car that has to sit in a garage due to neglect.  Don’t leave yours looking good but achieving nothing for you in terms of feeding your business great prospects.

Appletree’s Website Performance Reviews are a really easy-to-read and effective tool for your business.  We review how your website is performing in both technical and marketing terms.  We look at the following areas:

• Design – navigation issues, design errors, coding bugs, usability
• Content – Branding, messaging, calls to action
• SEO – using Google Analytics to chart visits by number and source, keywords.

Once analysed, recommendations are made to improve its performance.  These vary from simple copy changes to changes to meta data in the content management system which will result in improved SEO.

As for many businesses, looking at our own marketing could easily slip down the priority list as we focus on our clients.  To avoid this, we’ve added Appletree as a client to our work schedule.   One of the activities we’ve carried out recently for Appletree was indeed a Website Performance Review.  We spend a lot of our time advising our clients how to create and maintain a great website, but do we practice what we preach?  The results could have been scary!

Here’s a few of the actions we highlighted to investigate and change where necessary:

• The search function on the home page was on the left hand side at the bottom of the page – as web page standards go, these are usually located on the top right of the page.  So we moved it.

• There was no hyperlink to an email address on the home page.  So we created one.

• There is no title for a video on the home page.  This is needed to improve search.  We need to add this.

• Our own logo did not appear on the home page! Whilst we’ve always been aware of it, the report really highlighted the fact that we need to include it as part of the overall branding. (Sometimes it’s the most obvious things!)  We have,  needless to say, added it.

We’ve scheduled an Appletree Website Performance Review every month, after all we need to do marketing for ourselves as much as our clients!  If you want to talk about our Website Performance Reviews just give us a call on 01635 578500 or email me.