How do you feel about change? Do you embrace it or run a mile? 

One of the things we shouldn’t run a mile from as small business owners is changing our websites. Keeping them regularly updated with new content helps to improve SEO and gets our sites noticed by search engines. And that helps to get our businesses seen by the people we want to work with.

The start of autumn is a great time to make some small tweaks that will make a big difference to the look and feel of your website. 

This last quarter of the year is often the busiest, particularly if you’re a product-based business. So, getting your website shining brightly so that it’s working hard for your business is really important.

Whilst these changes are specifically aimed at this time of year, they can be tweaked slightly and used as the basis for a checklist at the start of each quarter.

Images

Make sure you replace summer images with autumn ones and if you don’t have any seasonal pictures, see if you can add some. If you’re creating Halloween products, take some pictures of them and get them added now.

Set a reminder to update them again at the beginning of November. Remove any that are Halloween-related and replace them with winter and Christmas images and don’t forget to include a keyword and description in the alt text when you upload them.

Seasonal products and sales

Look at what you plan on selling over the next few months.  If you’re a product-based business, do you have summer stock left that you could add to a sales section? Get your winter/Christmas stock on your website now, or if it’s not ready, add a “coming soon” section with snippets of what is going to be available.

Adding a link to a landing page to notify people when your winter/Christmas stock is released is a great idea too to get people interested in your new products. It not only helps you to get an idea about stock levels, but it can also help to bring new traffic to your website.

New service launch

Are you planning to launch a new service this quarter? If you hadn’t planned to, is there something you could create easily or tweak an existing service, or add a special offer or bundle?

If you are going to launch something new, add a countdown and details of what it is and when it will be released.

Check your links

Check your links are working both internally and to other sites. If you’ve got a lot of external links, use a plugin or website such as Broken Link Check to highlight which ones are a dead end. Focus on broken links in your most popular posts if you’ve got a lot and either fix or remove them.

As well as checking that your links are still working, make sure they are set to open in a new page. This helps to keep people on your website for longer which shows search engines that your content is worth reading. If you don’t do this, when a reader clicks on a link it opens the new website and takes them away from your page. Many won’t then click back to your website, and will just close the page and move on.

If you don’t have the time to do this, you could outsource it to a VA or someone who provides blogging support.

Plan seasonal content

Plan some Halloween and Christmas content and get writing! Your future self will thank you for getting ahead on your blog writing now before the mad rush starts in a few weeks.

If you’re a product-based business, it could be a post about your Christmas range, or your best sellers. Or you could do a “behind the scenes” post about your workspace and how you create your products.

Whatever type of business you have, seasonal posts such as tips for a stress-free Christmas, places to visit for free in December, the best outdoor places to visit in winter, are great for bringing new people to your website. And if they like what they see, they may share with their friends, or find out more about your products and services.

Update your keywords

And of course, spend some time checking that your keywords are up-to-date. This should be done every quarter to make sure they’re relevant and the ones people are using to search for businesses like yours.

Mini SEO audit

If you’d like some help to get your website shining brightly for the last quarter of the year, my mini SEO audit is for you.

I’ll check that your keywords are the right ones and are in the best places. I’ll then go through your home, about, and services page and put together an action plan for you to follow to make changes that will make it easier for your website to be seen by the people you want to do business with.

You’ll also get a copy of my SEO workbook which is worth £15 so that you can set up weekly and monthly tasks that will help your website to continue to shine brightly and work hard for your business.

If you’d like to book an SEO audit or if you’ve got a question about how it works, get in touch.

Simple SEO

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