Our lives have suddenly changed because of COVID-19, and the effects on business have been devastating.

Money is short for everyone, but there are some website fixes you can do yourself to help your business survive.

1. Do a deep review of your website. Not just the design. The most important part is the content you include and how visitors can navigate through it. Try to think like a visitor to your site.

• What information will they be looking for, and is it all there?
• Is it easy for them to find the information? Try to have everything be reachable within 3 clicks.
• Is it written in a way that’s easy to read? It should be short chunks using simple language.
• How can you improve your content to provide more value to the visitor?
• How can your navigation be changed to help guide them?
• Is your website mobile friendly? With most traffic being mobile now, this is really important. It helps the visitor and also helps your search engine rankings.
• Do you have links within content to help people move between related topics? For example, if an article references a particular service there should be a link to the page for that service.
• What are the questions you’re asked most frequently? You should have every one on a Frequently Asked Questions page. That saves time and frustration for both you and your site visitors.

2. Review your search engine listings and make changes to your site to help improve them. This isn’t referring to how high you rank; it’s about what pages are indexed by the search engine and how they appear to searchers.

There’s a quick way to see how every page on your site appears in search results; enter the following in the search box: site:yourdomain.com. So, if your website is xyz.com, you need to search for site:xyz.com. This tells the search engine to look for every page that’s indexed on that domain name.

• Are the titles interesting enough to grab attention?
• Does the description for each page accurately reflect the content on the page?
• You should rewrite all titles and descriptions that need improvement.
• If you notice any pages that you don’t want to show up in search engine results, you can either unpublish or delete a page (if you don’t want it to exist) or add a noindex meta tag to tell search engines to not include it in listings if you want to keep the page accessible but just not have it listed in search. Note: search engines aren’t required to obey the noindex tag, so don’t use it on anything sensitive. Get it off the web!

3. Research targeted search phrases and create a plan to write a page of content for each of them. Most people search like they talk or think, like “where is the Taj Mahal?” rather than “Taj Mahal location.” You want your website to include content that will more closely match the way people search. That’s why having a blog on your website is the #1 way to improve search engine results.

4. Offer lead magnets. A lead magnet is just something you offer visitors for free, to provide value and help educate them. Common lead magnets include worksheets, checklists, and booklets, and they’re usually offered in PDF format. You can require an email address for your more advanced lead magnets, but offer simpler ones without requiring an email to help build trust and goodwill.

Anyone should be able to do these 4 things for themselves; it just takes time and a bit of patience and creativity.

I wish you fair winds and following seas!