New year, new website. Or maybe just a better site. Today, we’re going over five must-dos for your website in 2019 that will help you climb the Google rankings a little higher, get more visitors and potentially more leads coming straight to your inbox.

Maybe one of your goals in the new year is to make more money in your business. One way we can help achieve that goal is by making small tweaks to your website that will help your viewer experience.

5 Things to do to Your Website to Get Found in Searches

1. Optimize for mobile. That means making sure our website is responsive and automatically adapt to the size of a user’s screen. Unlike Squarespace, where if you make one change it affects your mobile view unless you add custom CSS. (Which is a pain!) Showit allows you to create an experience for the desktop and then tailor the experience for mobile. Touch screen navigation can lead to accidental clicks if your buttons are too big or too small so I design my mobile site for fat fingers. When optimizing for mobile, get rid of pop-ups that automatically come up on screen. It can be difficult and frustrating to try and close these on a mobile device. This might lead to a high bounce rate.
2. Optimize images. Make sure pictures are less than >700kb. Large images slow your website down, and that hurts your ranking. You can use tools like Pingdom, which will help determine how fast (or slow) your site is. With Pingdom, you can monitor your websites’ uptime, performance, and interactions for a better experience for your user.
3. Check links. A lot of the time, we put our website up and never go back to check hyperlinks or menu options. When I do website reviews for other creatives eight out of ten times, I will find at least one broken link on their website. It’s a simple mistake that could be causing you to lose visitors. Especially if the link is not found on multiple places on your site. Or maybe you had a page or an offer that you deleted but the link still lingers and takes people to a non-existent page. In fact, 73.72% of people who reach a 404 error page will leave your website and not return.
4. Re-design your footer. The footer is a place where I see a lot of creatives miss the mark. The footer is an excellent opportunity to put valuable information. In the footer, I would include your email address, your location if you’re service-based business like a photographer, a “contact me” button, and your social media links.
5. This last one may require a little bit more work. You’ve probably heard it before, but there really is power in having an email list that you nurture and give valuable information. Whenever it came time to beta test my paid course, The Website Academy, I sent out one email, just one, to my list. I didn’t send it to everyone on my list. I sent the email to a very targeted demographic that showed interest in re-designing their website. Out of the 109 people, it went out to 3 people signed up just from one email.

So you’re probably wondering, what does this have to do with your website?

Set up an email list if you haven’t already and place the opt-in in at least three different places. Create a digital download or a coupon for people who sign up. Maybe you’re a wedding photographer, and you can give them a free bridal session when they sign up for your email list.

The point is to get hot leads signing up for your email list then providing valuable content to them on a regular basis. That could be once a month, once a week — that’s up to you. Then when you’re ready to sell or book they’re prepared to get their credit cards out.

The new year is the best time to get your website optimized because it’ll only help you reach your 2019 goals. Go back listen to this episode while taking action and implementing each of the five things.