We’re coming up on the end of the year, and even if you’re not planning on redesigning your website, all websites could use a yearly refresh.
These are five easy tasks you can do on your website that will 1) give it a fresh look without a time-intensive redesign, and 2) set you up for success for the New Year. Number 4 is so easy to do and can really help with your SEO efforts, but few people take the time to do it.
1. Update Brand Images + Headshots
Updating the images on your website can go a long way towards making it feel new. If you have the budget, consider hiring a dedicated brand photographer. We’ve interviewed a few brand photographer on the podcast before. Erica + Jon, Abby Grace and Renee Hollingshead (who took our brand images a few years ago). Photographers who specialize in brand photography will often help plan and style the shoot to maximize the number of images you can use throughout your online presence.
If you’re a photographer, consider doing a headshot swap with another photographer in your area. When we were photographers, this is something we used to do a few times a year with our photographer friends.
And if you’re not a photographer but you still work in the service industry, consider reaching out to local photographers anyways. You may still be able to trade services in some way. For example a photographer might happily exchange hair and makeup services in exchange for new headshots. You get new headshots and they look amazing for their own headshots. Win win!
2. Update your portfolio or case studies featuring some of your very best work from the past year.
If you have a busy season, it likely takes all of your energy just to serve your clients, share your work on social media and get a few blog posts up. So now is a great time to take some of your best work and use it to update your website.
Refresh the images on your homepage, in your portfolio or case studies and pull together a few fresh blog posts.
Just going through steps one and two can really make a HUGE impact on your site. You can definitely put up your feet and stop here if you’d like. BUT if you want to take things a step farther, continue with these next steps.
3. Pick a Page and Update the Copy
Pick ONE page that maybe you feel like just isn’t where you want it to be, and update the copy on that page.
Copywriter Jess Jordana actually sells prompts in her shop that help with this exact task. Guess what? After you update just one page, I’d be willing to bet that you’ll want to update a few more pages too. Just start with one though and build momentum from there.
And even if you don’t move on to other pages, you’ll have at least updated that one page.
4. Content Audit
This is one of Davey’s favorite things to do when he has some time. A content audit is a great way to make the most out of your current content and optimize your website for search engines.
Here is the gist of what we do:
- Go through your blog content and decide what needs to be updated or just removed because it’s no longer relevant. One of the great things about this process if that we often find that a lot of our content just needs a refresh – which is much easier than creating new content. We’ve seen content that didn’t previously rank well move up in search engine results.
- We use Google Analytics and Search Console to help us with this task. We pay special attention to pages that are showing up in results 8-20, which is typically the bottom of the first page and second page of the search results, and I update those pages first since sometimes even minor improvements can push those pages and posts to the first page.
- This task can be a bit time intensive, especially if you have a lot of content, but it’s so worth it. It’s easy to tidy up your blog, make the most of the content you already have, AND generate new content ideas.
5. Gather New Testimonials
Reach out to some of your best customers or clients from the past year and get updated testimonials. This is a great way to stay connected with your community, and to get customers to explain in their own words why they loved working with you or how well your product worked for them. You can also use these in other places like social media in the upcoming year!
If you’re not sure how to gather testimonials, we shared three tips for getting good reviews in a previous post.
And that’s that. Even if you just focused on the four quicker tasks, your website will be looking fresh going into the new year. But seriously, even though content audits take a bit of time, we think it’s 100% worth it.
Want to go even deeper?
Check out out DIY Off-Season Website Review »
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