If you are looking to quickly and economically make some changes to your website that won’t break the bank, and that you may be able to do yourself, the content of your website is the best place to start. I think this is the area that most businesses need to work on – either by creating more content, trimming it down, or just updating it. 
 
 

Your homepage is your storefront window online – make sure it invites visitors to come in and explore more of your website. Give visitors a reason to click around. It should clearly identify who you are and what you do, but it must also allow visitors to easily find your products, services or information that they are looking for when they arrive there. If they can’t, they leave, you lose!

 

Read your opening paragraphs for homepage and main pages. If they aren’t engaging your customers, then rewrite them. If your text is too wordy or blocky, or you use too much jargon, simplify and replace it with only the necessary information that people are looking for on that page or section. 

 

People are lazy when it comes to reading information on a website – they just want to quickly scan through it and see if it’s interesting enough to either click something else or to read further. By using headings, sub-headings, bulleted or numbered lists, and short concise sentences, you will make the text more “web-friendly” and “scan-able” for visitors.

 

Search engines love content, especially new content. Try to write some new content on a regular basis. You don’t have to write a novel, just some good valuable information that your customers will find useful.

Write new content based on season, or what's happening at your operation. If you are closing for the winter be sure and indicate that on your home page, and you winter contact information. AND when you plan on reopening.
 

Many operators in business for a long time will be able to predict what will transpire over the season. Pre write this content for posting during your busy season so you can spend more time with your guests and less time with writer's block

 

Hopefully, many of the people that come to your site are going to want to contact you at some point, make sure they can by providing clear contact information for your business. Just having a form for users to fill out is not enough. Phone numbers emails and job descriptions for all staff and departments listed on your website is the key to success. List phone numbers or emails on each selling page, whereever the visitor might want to purchase an item.

 

To make sure that search engines can find all this great new content, you should create a sitemap.xml file for your website. There are many tools online that can help you generate them, and they are a very quick and effective way to improve search results for your website.

 

Google Analytics is a free resource that you can use to monitor most of your website stats. Depending on your website, it should be easy to have your web developer install.  This will allow you to see what pages are most popular on your site, from where and when the traffic arrives to your site, and overall how your site is doing from time to time.
 
 

If you aren’t 100% comfortable writing content, a quick search for “writing for the web” will reveal many resources to guide you on how to write copy. If you still don’t feel you are up to it, or you really want to get the most out of updating it, consider hiring a professional copywriter or web writer to help or to do the work for you. Either way, just updating the current copy will go a long way in improving your website and its performance.