Website Management: How It Can Boost Your ROI
Your website is the foundation of all your marketing efforts. It’s the place where your existing and prospective customers come to learn more about your products or services and your business as a whole. Your website is where potential partners come to learn more about your brand and where your prospects book a demo or request more information about your products or services. It’s also where your landing pages sit, where prospects land after clicking on one of your ads. In essence, your website is fundamental to not only your marketing success but the success of your business as a whole, which is why management of your website needs to be a daily priority. In this article, we’ll look at what makes up website management and how it can boost your ROI.
What Is Website Management?
Website management is a term to describe combining several services to run your website effectively. Typically website management will involve:
Website security
Content management
Website support
Effective website management, particularly if you’re running a small business, will involve you outsourcing the services to a web design agency or a digital marketing agency that offers website maintenance services. Larger enterprises may have designated in-house teams that are responsible for the ongoing management of their companies' websites.
Suppose you’ve had a website created or updated by a designer or an agency in the past. In that case, they may also offer ongoing website management services as part of their service portfolio, which you can utilize.
How Can Website Management Boost Your ROI?
A Secure Website Ranks Well, Brings in More Traffic and Reduces Website Downtime
Websites are constantly under the threat of attack from hackers and cybercriminals. These attacks can cause your website to crash, infect the device your website’s visitors are using, phish for potentially compromising information, and much more.
As you can imagine, any attack on your website can have disastrous effects on your business, particularly if sensitive data is compromised or your website is down for a while. In the event of an attack, you could face problems such as:
A loss of traffic, leads, and customers for your business.
There is a loss of trust in your brand from your website visitors and customers, mainly if your website is down for a considerable time.
Poor user experience and slow loading times on your website.
Potential legal issues if confidential customer information is compromised.
Effective ongoing website security involves passive management like setting up good firewalls to block potential hackers and active management through measures such as regular malware scans and keeping your website architecture up to date.
With your website security intact, you can be safe knowing that your website visitors are protected when they visit, use, and purchase from your site.
Good web security also helps your search visibility. In an analysis of over 1 million results, Backlinko found that websites with a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate in place consistently ranked higher than websites without this certificate.
Uploading Content Optimised for SEO and Optimising Existing Content Boosts Your Traffic
Your website should never be treated as a static object. One of the most essential elements to the success of any website is the continual adding of new content and the optimization of existing content.
For the benefit of your website, you’ll want to make sure any new content you publish is optimized for SEO; some best practices include:
Carrying out keyword research for the topic you’re writing about.
Use keywords naturally and strategically in your content.
Optimize title tags and meta descriptions.
Optimize the length of your content; the latest research suggests long-form pieces of 2000 words are the most reliable way to push your business up the search results page.
Some of the best practices for optimizing existing content on your site include:
Make sure the information in the content is up to date and relevant.
Make sure that any outbound and inbound links are still active.
Make sure that each page on your site contains a meta description, optimized URL, and alt image text for any images present on a page.
Whoever is looking after your website management will generally take care of optimizing your existing content, but this may also fall under the responsibilities of an in-house content team if you have one.
Ongoing Website Support Keeps Your Website Functioning
Website support is somewhat of an umbrella term to describe a multitude of different factors that overlap but are not exclusive to website security or content management. Website support can include services such as:
Web design edits.
Website navigation changes.
Analytics management.
Plugin improvements and updates.
Server updates.
Site and data backup.
Landing page maintenance and much, much more.
Just like web security, regularly carrying out these tasks is key to maintaining your website’s functionality and performance. Keeping on top of plugin, theme, server/hosting updates will ensure your website’s loading times remain optimal and that all the plugins you’re using continue to function as they should.
Monitoring and analyzing your website’s analytics such as your organic traffic, time on page, bounce rate, and conversion rate.
These metrics will help you see if your site is drawing in and keeping visitors on-site and inform you as to whether you need to make some changes to your site to improve these metrics.
Conclusion
Keeping your website up to date and well maintained is vital if you want to keep attracting new visitors to your website and converting those visitors into leads and customers.
