A New Website For The New Year?

Is your website still capable of doing the business for your business in 2021? An SEO company in NZ says there’s only one way to find out. Take a good, close look at the site and its associated analytics and be prepared to make a few tough calls. Here are a few signs that strongly suggest a new website might be needed for the New Year.

• A high bounce rate. A bounce rate is typically defined as the percentage of single-page visitors to your site. To put it another way, it’s the percentage of people who come to your site and only visit the page they land on without clicking through to another page. These people probably didn’t find what they were after, weren’t interested in what the page had to say, or found it too slow or difficult to use. A bounce rate of over 70% suggests you need to consider a redesign, new copy and content or, dare we say it, a new site.

• Slow page load speeds. This is a big issue particularly on older sites. Your potential customers are not patient people, so they won’t wait for a page to load and will move onto a faster site in the blink of an eye. That bounce rate figure will increase as a result. To make matters worse, Google prioritizes load speeds when determining your website’s search ranking. This is a huge deal because more than 90 % of organic search traffic comes from Google.

• Your website looks ancient. Websites have been around long enough now that some of them are old enough to look positively ancient. If this is the case with your site, it makes your brand seem amateurish and from the dark ages. The best way to check the design of your site is to do a straight comparison with your competitors. Don’t be surprised if your most successful rivals have a great looking site.

• It’s been a while since you updated your site. Besides visual appeal, there are other reasons why this could be an issue. One of the biggest is the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate; if your URL doesn’t have the little padlock icon in front of it, it is not deemed to be secure and that is not good. An SSL certificate is a significant factor in how well your website ranks during a search.

• Confusing website navigation. It is possible to overwhelm visitors with menu options which leads to a genuinely confusing experience. When potential customers come to your website, they want a simple and efficient visit where it’s easy to find their way through the site and get to what they need. If it’s not a breeze, they’ll bounce out again.

• Your site is not mobile friendly. Around the world, mobile website traffic makes up more than 50 % of web visits. If your site isn’t compatible with mobile devices, imagine how much business you could be missing out on!

• Poor conversion rates. This is what it’s all about, isn’t it? lf your leads and not being converted into customers, it’s time for an upgrade. After all, they’ve come to your site but there’s something about it that doesn’t entice them to go further.

Our SEO experts in New Zealand believe that if you’re seeing too many of these signs with your website, you may need to say goodbye to the old and hello to the new in 2021…and the sooner, the better.

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