Your digital presence has become even more important in the era of the coronavirus pandemic. These are issues to consider to improve website performance and drive traffic.
Brand Content
Brand content is how you present yourself, visually and in language. This is perhaps the easiest fix for a business to do themselves - as most businesses will be able to access and change website pages in-house. Events are all about people, so make sure you have a ‘meet the team’ page. People like to put a face to a name so use good
photography. Share your news and comment on industry news to engage your readers and keep content updated regularly. If you feel your visual presentation isn’t presenting your business right, it may be worth making bigger changes to your site.
Performance
Speed and a mobile-friendly site are the key performance indicators in an events website. Your clients need to get to information fast and on the run. You can arrange an audit on your website and lots of
digital marketing agencies will happily do one free of charge to let you know how your website is performing in those two ways and others. Sometimes there are simple fixes, like reducing image size, for example, that can make your site perform better within minutes.
UX/Navigation
User experience is all about making sure your site is clearly signposted to help every different user to their intended destination. Just like signposts on a road, a journey that gets user’s lost will result in frustration and negativity towards your business. A reader might want some information quickly like an address or a
speaker’s biography, and you must make sure there is a logical and quick way to achieve this.
Content
Information is not just designed for the reader, which is where SEO (search engine optimisation) comes into it.
Rich Tarr, Clicky Media.You must make sure your website contains the language that people may search for. For example, ‘events venue central London 350 people’.
You may not feel the need to include that copy when communicating with customers, but you need to when communicating with the search engine crawlers.
Mobile-first sites mean you must keep copy short and concise, Instagram has made this even more pertinent with readers preferring images rather than copy – so it becomes a balancing act between the two to achieve the ideal content.
CRO
CRO stands for conversion rate optimisation. This, on a practical level, means removing all the potential barriers in your site that could prevent your user’s journey going in the direction you want it to. So, if you want to collect data for marketing purposes, it could be a mistake to expect someone to fill in a whole contact form. Perhaps change this to just an e-mail address? Or if your purpose is to draw users towards your most recent successes, have a panel to click on to this as soon as the site opens.
Rich Tarr is head of development at digital marketing specialists Clicky.
