A website is essential for any organisation. It’s the single and most important marketing tool for any business looking to attract new customers and grow. Therefore, it’s vitally important to keep the content up to date and functionality of the site performing to its best.
Here are a few simple tips, from basic maintenance to more advanced techniques to make your website site work harder in marketing your school to visitors and users.
Add new information
Fresh material added regularly to your site keeps visitors coming back to see what’s new. People visiting your site tend to notice when you keep your site up to date and by adding new and useful information they will see you as an authority and expert.
Google and other search engines appreciate fresh content and will usually reward your site with an added boost in search rankings. If you are consistently generating content, smart search engines will recognize you as a valuable resource to display in a search result. Likewise, if content has got dates on it – blog posts and events, It makes sense to remove or update old content.
Update the look of the site
The visual appeal of your site is critical to convey the right impression of an organisation. Carefully chosen images that reflect your service and values are an important opportunity to quickly capture visitors’ attention. Top quality professionally shot photographs add visual impact and twice as many viewers will look at a picture than will read your headline. Pictures can increase the response of a promotion by 50%. Professionally shot generic pictures can be purchased for as little as £10 from stock library sites like Shutterstock and iStock.
Good copy sells
Copy content should be concise and easy to understand. Web users don’t read a lot. Studies show that in a best-case scenario, we only read 28% of the text on a web page. The challenge is to produce valuable, targeted content on a regular basis that drives readership and maintains user engagement.
Build a database
Capturing email addresses from the visitors to your website is an important strategy for building a prospective customer database. It will enable you to keep in touch with them and let them know about special events or new initiatives. You can get email addresses by placing a sign-up form on your home page offering a newsletter or event updates.
Make your website more sociable
Social media gives you another channel to connect and interact with your students and the extended school community. Social media is increasingly being used as a broadcast medium as a one-way communication from the school to parents and an information portal.
Social media is the perfect platform to quickly and easily promote events, announce news and engage with users to share information and collaborating with other students.
Add a Twitter micro blog
With more than 465 million accounts and 175 million tweets every single day Twitter has become a favourite tool for social media marketing. Twitter is a simple and effective tool to increase awareness about your school. You can use it to inform the school community about upcoming events or about any new announcements. Students can also use the school’s Twitter account to interact with other students or teachers, or to enable easy internal collaboration and group communication.
Know how your website is being used
Add Google Analytics to find out who’s looking at your site. Google Analytics is the industry standard for web analytics. It can help you find out how your website is performing and lets you measure user behaviour such as how many visitors use your site, how they arrived on your site, and how you can keep them coming back. Google Analytics is free to use and over 50 million websites around the world currently use it to help them analyse website traffic. If you are not using it, you should set it up right now.
Be easier to find
Make sure your website is search engine optimised – search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of taking steps to ensure that your site is placed higher in search engine results than your competitors’ websites. Search engine spiders crawl text and content so make sure your page names, file names, image alts, and Meta tags contain keywords to get better search rankings and increased site traffic.
Every content update you make to your website plays a part in its interaction with visitors, customers, and the search engines. A frequently updated website offers search engines a haven for fresh content and sources of new information for their search requests ultimately improving a sites SEO.
Don’t forget as a Lite subscriber you can also access the wealth of articles we have available under the Free package too. If you’re pleased with the results you’ve achieved using the Lite package you can sign up to our waiting list for the Premium package which will be coming soon and will help boost your brand presence even further with consultative support and access to industry experts.