How often are you digging deep into your website to evaluate and adjust where needed?
B2B companies should assess their websites more than once a year by scheduling a mid-year website health check. Keeping your company's website relevant means keeping it compliant with search engine and buyer expectations. A well-built and maintained website is more likely to be found online and ensure a better user experience.
Reasons You Need a Mid-Year Website Health Check
Some businesses only assess their website annually. However, adding a mid-year website health check can help catch website issues before they really impact your visitor’s experience or your SEO rankings.
Search Engine Algorithms Change – You Should Too!
Did you know that Google’s algorithm changes hundreds of times each year? And, the search engine is likely to go through a couple major shifts each year.
If you aren’t on top of adjusting to these changes, you could lose your edge over competitors. You will find it harder to adjust if you don’t have built-in times to re-assess your current approach and potential changes impacting SEO.
You Should Perform Backups and Updates
Included in your twice-yearly website checkup should be an update to your software and a revisit of your disaster recovery plans. Don’t assume things will go smoothly. Always hope for the best and prepare for the worst. Examine the most current cyber threats and how your policies are protecting you from attacks.
Your Visitors’ Needs Will Evolve
Over time, your buyers are going to change their expectations and needs. If you don’t make time for regular evaluations throughout the year, you could miss an important shift in the dynamic. Even though you are selling to another business, the person searching for solutions and ultimately making the purchase decision is still a person. You should appeal to your target buyers with a convenient buyer’s journey mapped out and a cohesive message.
When your business or audience changes, it’s important your website pivots as well. Make sure the messaging and voice are in line with your current direction.
You May Discover Content Gaps
Every six months, reconsider how your site is funneling visitors. Look for areas where you are losing visitors and try to strengthen the website experience. Make sure you aren’t targeting too narrowly or leaning too heavily on only one part of the buyer’s journey. This is the perfect opportunity to conduct a content audit to see how balanced your current pages are in targeting each buyer persona and stage of the buyer’s journey.
As you conduct your website audit, you might notice gaps in the topics you address. This provides a great opportunity to evaluate and adjust your content strategy for the remainder of the year. You should also assess if you are offering the right mix of content to educate your potential buyers or established customers.
Content Grows Outdated
Finally, it’s important to use your content audit to look for pieces that need to be updated. Part of a mid-year website health check should include updating key pieces of content and deleting (or archiving) outdated pieces. Use this time to look for broken links, old stats, incorrect information and anything that didn’t age well.
During your mid-year website health check, you can make a list of which content pieces need edits or adjustments so they are relevant once again. Updating existing content can actually save your marketing team and content writers a lot of time; you will get a valuable piece of content to promote once again without putting in the work of starting a new content piece from scratch.
Regular Changes Show You Are Active
Changing headers and images regularly can help refresh your pages to show you are active. While you don’t want every page to need continual updates, it’s not ideal to keep your site stagnant for years at a time. You can use the refresh to make minor changes that keep your pages fresh and relevant.
A Year Between Checks is Too Long
Only conducting an annual check means any issues on your site might sit there for months. If your pages are loading slowly or something strange is altering your mobile layout, you might not even know about it until your next check.
Conducting website health checks twice a year gives you that halfway mark to reevaluate and reassess. You will have double the opportunity to catch issues and you can catch things twice as fast when you change your audit to twice yearly instead of just once.