Your website is the most important aspect of your online presence bar none. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got 100,000 followers on Twitter, 10,000 likes on your Facebook page, 4,000 connections on LinkedIn and an established and authoritative presence on Google+ – if none of these sites are pointing your followers towards your website, then you might as well not have any at all.
Ok, so perhaps that is a little drastic, and if you have managed to establish for yourself such a social media fan base without a website, then you will be in a pretty good position once you get going. But, be that hypothetical situation as it may, let’s assume that you do have a website.
Of course you have one. You know just as much as the next person that in this day and age, if you haven’t got a website, then you haven’t got a business.
Let’s face facts. It is a simple truism that the vast majority of people out there validate the credence of a company by doing a quick Google search. Doesn’t matter what your company is or does or sells, people these days want to get to know your business online – and increasingly they are turning to their mobile browser to try and retrieve that information (more on that later).
So, what do users find when they type in your company’s name into Google? Or – and perhaps this is the more pertinent point – how does your website compare to your competitors’ when users are searching for the services that you offer?
As I say, I have absolutely no doubt at all that you’ve got a website already – you’ve probably had one since at least 2009, if not earlier. And here is the worry. Are you still using the exact same site, with the exact same features and functionality that you were 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 years ago? If the answer is “yes”, then so is the answer to titular question of this blog post – ‘Is Now The Time To Start Considering A New Website?’
Yes, it is.
It’s All About SEO
Like it or not, Google hold the power of the internet. The company has crowned itself judge, jury and executioner of the whole digital universe. And therefore that means that whatever you do within that digital universe – such as build a website, for instance – you must conform to Google’s rules if you want that website to perform well in search.
So, what are the rules?
Well, the most pertinent one in this instance is the one that says if your website is not producing fresh content, then Google will not be ranking your site very highly on SERPs (search engine results pages).
Of course, your blog will be providing a lot of this fresh content – however, the static content on your website (i.e. the stuff on your home page, your about page etc.) needs freshening up every once in a while too if you’re going to keep Google happy.
What is more, Google also likes to see a nice fresh brand new website go up, with all new frameworks and coding and smooth performance and all the rest. And guess what – your customers will also appreciate this too. In fact you might be able to rejuvenate some of their interest in your site if you give it a makeover, and the more people that visit your site, the more pleasing you are in the eyes of Google, and so your SEO will improve as a result.
Mobile-Friendly Algorithm Update
The preferred platform on which to access the web these days is via a mobile. Indeed, according to Smart Insights, mobile users will overtake desktop users by more that 200 million this year.
Google have not ignored this phenomenon, and nearly 2 months ago now, Google rolled out its algorithm change, which now means that mobile-friendliness is an official ranking factor for all websites – including yours.
This means that if your site is not optimised for mobile, then the Google jury will see fit to find you guilty of falling behind the times of what internet users want, Google will pass judgement that you shall be sentenced to falling 100 places down search rankings, and Google will execute this move every time someone searches for your services using their mobile device.
Responsive Design (At The Very Least)
If your website was built before 2012 and has hardly been touched by a developer since, then the chances are quite high that it will not have been responsively designed.
This means that when people view your website on their mobile screens, they will have to pinch, zoom, horizontally scroll and all of those other horrible things that you have to do when visiting a site that hasn’t been responsively designed on a mobile.
With responsive design, however, the website will realign and resize and reshape itself in response to the browser which it is being viewed on – which of course comes in most handy when your site is being viewed on a mobile browser.
However, responsive design is quickly going out date. Put simply, the majority of people are now accessing the web on their mobiles, which means that it is a mobile-first approach to your website that needs to be taken when it’s built.
Mobile friendliness is now an official ranking factor – but this only highlights the trend on the web. If you think that most of your customers are going to still be sat in front of their laptops or desktops when they visit your site, then you need to think again. Most of them are now going to be coming from mobiles, which means that if your site is out of date and looks and performs poorly on handsets, then your customers are simply going to go elsewhere.
If this is you, then, again, yes – now is the time to start considering a new website, and you can get in touch with us here at to see how we can help build a new website for you that’s ahead of the game.
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