In today's high-speed world, a website can feel outdated a month after it's redesigned, at least to the team that worked on it. While a month or even a year may not be enough to make your website outdated, there are some surefire ways to determine if your website is outdated and in need of a redesign.
If you meet any of the criteria below for crappy, outdated websites, you need to act immediately -- or risk falling behind your competition:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is no longer optional if you're figuring out how to modernize a website. That is a reality of having a business website. If you aren't trying to improve your search engine rank on an ongoing basis, you aren't serious about using your website to grow your business. You have to be where your ideal buyer is looking and one of those places is most certainly Google.
The bottom line is that not having a SEO strategy means your website is outdated.
Having no analytics package installed on your website is a clear sign that your website is outdated. Any remotely modern site will have at least Google Analytics installed. If you're not sure if you have Google Analytics installed, we have a post for that here.
Not having analytics means not being able to track the effectiveness of your website. Tracking is one of the biggest advantages to inbound marketing. Unlike other marketing tactics, you can know exactly what is working and what needs improved.
Google recently stated that over 52% of searches are now done from a mobile device. If your website doesn't adapt and render well on a mobile device, 52% of the searchers that find you are hitting the back button. That's a surefire sign you need to work on how to make your website look modern. If you want to test how your site looks on a mobile device, take the darn phone out of your pocket and go to your site!
You can also resize your web browser down to a smaller size to see if your site uses responsive design. There are also online emulators you can find to replicate a mobile device.
Video can help elevate your website in multiple ways. First, the way people consume content is always changing. Presently, people are consuming content more frequently via video. Website visitors are much more likely to engage with videos than static text, so creative more visual and interactive content is essential.
Additionally, videos are great for SEO purposes. Every video you're posting can be targeted with a keyword. If a person was to search a specific keyword in Google that happens to be included in the title of your video on YouTube, your video would be much more likely to appear in the search results. Adding video to your website will help you get noticed.
Does your website have links to CTAs? Or is it bland and a dead-end? Do yourself a favor and add some call-to-action buttons. The call to action is a way to direct focus and give the visitor a clear route to accomplishing a goal. When creating call to action buttons, consider what you want the visitor to do: what your primary aim is, and how this fits in with their objectives. Examples of this could be:
Regardless of what the CTA is asking the customer to do, your conversion rates will increase. CTAs tend to cause website visitors to spend more time on your website, rather than visiting briefly and navigating away after not being prompt with a next step.
There are many other elements that could help determine if your site is outdated, but these 3 are biggies. So what's the verdict? Does your website need an upgrade?
SEO optimization is almost always the first step in improving your business's online presence. Grab the free e-book below to learn about how to research relevant keywords to use on your website:
(This article was originally published in February 2015 and was recently updated.)
