Website Makeover - Step 1

Tweet

As some of you know, I’ve been blogging for a couple of years now, but I finally launched my own website last week. I’m turning my attempt at being Webmaster into a “teachable” moment. (And a lesson in humility on my part.)

As I mentioned last Friday, content is king so I started by adding content that I thought was most appropriate to my audience. I’m still not completely satisfied with it, but I believe in testing everything. I will play around a bit with the content and layout to test the impact this has on conversions down the road. For now, the trick is to be found because if you can’t be found, you can’t convert no matter how stellar your content is.

After putting 8 pages together over a couple of evenings, I ran it through Hubspot’s Website Grader to see how it performed with absolutely no optimization what-so-ever. I’m pleased to say that I scored a 21, which means that my website is better than 21% of the other websites that Website Grader has had the opportunity to review. I was amazed I scored this well because I really did absolutely no optimization at all. Makes me wonder what those other sites look like.


My first steps in optimization were the obvious ones:

- I added H1 Tags
- I added a meta description for each page.
- I added key words

After running the site through website grader again, I scored a 27. Not a huge improvement, but I didn’t do all that much so it was a good beginning.

Thanks to Hubspot, I also realized I had made a couple small mistakes. My description was a little too long. Hubspot and other experts recommend no more than 150 characters. That was easy to fix. Luckily, Twitter has many of us used to thinking in 140 characters or less.

I also had a few too many keywords. Hubspot recommended 10. More and you run the risk of diluting their effectiveness. That was a little harder to fix, but narrowing down my keywords should allow me to better optimize my copy when I come back to that.

I also had more than one H1 tag per page. Hubspot didn’t see this as a major issue but that was simple to fix as well so I took care of it.

I’ve taken my first step in this journey of a thousand miles. Now it’s time for step 2. I’ll keep you posted. And, if any of you are interested in providing your own feedback and ideas for the most important things to fix, you can find my site at The Marketing Survivalist. I welcome your input.

All the best!

Melissa