This is our guidance on how you can get the most from your website.
Keep website information up to date
When you have a website, it’s vital that it always has the latest and correct information.
If there are changes or promotions you want to tell people about, we recommend updating your website with the details before anywhere else, as a lot of people will look to your website as the main source of information.
Customers or users are likely to lose trust if a website shows the wrong details. If there are changes such as price increases, sales, service changes or special events, make sure they are detailed on your website first. It’s also helpful to let people know that changes are coming, for example, if you know prices are changing on 1 April, you could add this information to a costs page e.g. ‘Prices will change on 1 April’.
Use good quality and unique content
The content on your website should be of high quality and original, this will help customers/users and search engines. We recommend the following for website content:
- Use plain English – everyone appreciates plain English
- Avoid duplicating information – saying something clearly once is usually enough
- Make your content easy to maintain – where possible, avoid text that will go out of date quickly
- Make your content accessible – think about people who need assistive technology to use websites
- Focus on customer tasks – what is the user likely to want to do/know
- Be consistent – e.g. with your language style and page structure
Link to your website as much as possible
The more traffic your website gets, the better. We recommend adding a link to your website from as many official/trusted places as you can, including your:
- Blog
- Facebook account
- Google business account
- Instagram account
- LinkedIn profile
- Twitter account
- Youtube channel
You can add links from other social media accounts and websites, but we recommend avoiding the following as they can harm your website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
- low-quality web directories
- low-quality article directories
- low-quality guest posts
- spam comments
Advertise/Share the main URL
We’d recommend advertising your website’s main URL as often and as consistently as possible e.g. including a sentence on any letters, posters and adverts such as ‘visit www.yourwebsite.com for more information’.
Add a Call to Action button on Facebook
You can add a Call to Action (CTA) button on Facebook, you may want to add one for visiting your website, or using an online contact form (the contact form should capture more details than a FB message).
Find out how to add a CTA on Facebook
Post about your website on social media
As long as you’re happy to, you could post on social media that you have a website. One option is to post about it every so often, ideally changing the message and highlight different pages.