Updates to your website are some of the simplest things you can do to increase traffic and conversion rates. The best updates come from a solid content strategy that improves the user experience.
Getting Started: Spreading the News
Here are three reasons to set up your website so it can quickly broadcast news about your community:
- Brand Identity – Your brand encompasses more than a logo and tagline. It involves your employees, the services you provide, and how you help your community. All of these are great headlines for any news section, plus they define your brand and what it stands for. Over time, you could become a resource for others. Now that’s brand recognition!
- Improved Client Experience – Making your clients aware of recent news about your industry helps them understand their own challenges. This improves trust and credibility—two emotions linked to decision making. When your clients trust you, they will turn to you first for answers.
- Domain Authority – Where do you show up in a Google search? 1st page? 3rd page? Where you land on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) depends a great deal on your domain authority and what your competition is doing. Moz, a leader in SEO, states, “Domain authority is meant to approximate how competitive a given site is in Google search results.” One of the ways to influence your domain authority is to update the content on your website frequently.
Blogs, Vlogs, & News Tickers
Your blog is the most common area of your website that spreads news about your company. Blogs are necessary for SEO purposes, but vlogs will get more engagement. The right mix of both is important. Just remember to maintain a professional appearance and hire a good editor.
Have you ever thought of a news ticker for your home page? Just like a stock ticker showing real-time trades, it’s a simple addition that displays blurbs about your company and leads to other articles on the same subject.
Multimedia: Improve SEO and Brand Identity
Videos, animation, graphics and images make a website look great. People would rather watch a video than read long, text-heavy pages. Studies have shown that people tend to leave those text-heavy pages, so it’s best to break them up with graphics and images that fit the topic. The whole idea behind SEO is to meet each visitor’s expectations, enticing them to stay on the page longer.
Did you know that your multimedia may be working against your SEO efforts? Large files take longer to load, which leads to a terrible SERP ranking. Compressed images and embedded videos on a separate platform create a better user-experience (UX). People don’t have the patience to wait for a video to load or constantly pause while buffering.
39% of people will stop engaging with a website if images won’t load or take too long to load
Using stock photos is good, but it doesn’t necessarily improve the UX or your search rankings. A reason for this is that other websites often use those same images with the same tags, so you’re left with no distinctive identifiers. Unique images are better for SEO and your overall brand identity. Candid photos are great for a blog, but your home and about page should have professionally composed and edited images. Appearances do matter, and you have less than a second to make visitors feel welcome.
The best opportunity to succeed with SEO is to make some of those little tweaks to your website. If you can’t make them, then it’s time for a complete overhaul of your site. Simple updates to your website can improve the user experience and generate valuable, qualified sales leads. Whether it’s to improve navigation or the overall user experience, Pinstripe can create videos, blogs and optimize images for your website. We can also take professional photos and assist you in setting up a studio for recording vlogs. Contact us today to find out how we can help you overcome the challenges associated with SEO.
