How To Website Refresh In The Cut Back Economy

The rise of Social Media has been running alongside the descent into, and recovery from recession, and now faces the coming cut backs. Yet at the same time, businesses have been handed new online marketing opportunities to engage with new consumers, if only their websites were ready to take advantage!

Everyone has heard of Twitter and Facebook by now! And a business website is now considered a working part of brand identity presence online, towards which, social media messaging helps drive a wider audience engagement.

Bringing your website up to speed is essential to be seen to be relevant in today’s multi platform environment. The vital importance of website accessibility by your key customer preferred channels, whether by mobile, tablet, netbook or traditional PC / laptop browsers, cannot be underestimated. If they can’t find you by the new technologies and info share mediums, you’re not in on the conversation – and that potential sales grid!

A regular website refresh is always a good move at any time. Under the coming cut back tidal waves, being seen to be riding the rough surf by continued investing in customer engagement and traffic driving, will be both shrewd and practical.

Remember- keep optimised with fresh content! It’s an established mantra for website survival and social media success.

In the run up to next year’s VAT increase and the budget cut backs start to bite, engage your website design and marketing agency to work on ensuring key areas of website functionality are first, performing at full strength.

Is your website fully search engine friendly ? Does your CMS enable easy search engine access for indexing, SERPS and ranking? If Google can’t read you, no one else will!

Focus on organic SEO – the real friend of long term marketing strategies. In the months ahead, concentrate on where your link building will deliver best results. Inbound links from other high ranking sites, ultimately fed by social media messaging, will significantly drive up regular traffic.

This means bringing your keyword phrases up to date! Do you offer new products and services? Has your business model changed? Look at those search terms that your business now needs to focus on and will be targeting in the foreseeable future. Remember - you need to keep proving to a search engine how important your site is to a particular search term.

Regular, fresh quality written content now reigns supreme! From articles, blogs and newsletters to other mediums such as video, and podcasts, the search engine algorithms are primed to recognise valuable online material. They not only take your SEO terms into account, but also register the audience response to content, by quality and volume, actively re-indexing with each new content addition.

So ensure you have a blog facility in place and a good blog writer to do the job! And this means at least 2-3 times per week! Posting 2 or 3 times a year is not going to do anything for your rankings. Especially in the age of realtime news, mobile internet and viral messages – hitting the retweet or recommend button means your readers will vote good quality blog content and get your company name out there!

Constant engagement is the key to moving forward. You must ensure you operate an optimised website in tandem with social media activity. By wisely investing into a cost effective, refreshed SEO optimised website, and using chosen social media channels to attract and retain an online community tuned into your message updates, you will more easily trade through the changing economy ahead.