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Maintenance
Launching your website is only the first step in providing online content to your users - your work doesn’t end there. For a website to continue to serve its purpose and fulfil users’ needs, you need to regularly maintain it.
Content
Content strategy, which you’ve created at the beginning your website project, will guide what should be updated when and by whom.
Your updates should include:
- Adding new content
- Revising already published content
- Refreshing images
- Removing any outdated or no longer relevant content
Whenever a new web page is created, make sure you fetch the URL in Google Search Console, so that your content is indexed and searchable quicker.
Data
Check regularly what your site users are doing when they visit your website. Does it align with your strategy and goals?
Google Analytics will give you the hard data on how visitors use your site and if they can find the content you want them to. You can also reach out for anecdotal feedback from your students, staff and faculty members.
Optimization
SEO
To check your site’s SEO performance, use Google Search Console. This tool analyzes keyword usage and the terms used to drive users to your site. The tool will also outline any issues with your current SEO set-up.
Take the data and analyze your page content to see where you could make improvements.
Conversions
Conversion is the completion of an action you'd like your user to take, such as signing up for an email, visiting a web page or downloading a document. Once you've identified these actions, you can set up campaigns and goals in Google Analytics to monitor if these are performing well. Remember to check regularly and adjust where necessary.
Try answering the following questions:
- Can I see any trends?
- Are there specific calls to action that work better for my users?
- Which channels bring users that convert?
- Which sections/pages work best for promoting the content I want my users to visit?
- How can I use the data to drive users to priority content?
A/B test
A reliable way to get the most out of your content is to A/B test it - create two versions that will be randomly shown to the user to determine, based on data, which one is performing better.
In order to learn what works well for your users, it's important that there is only one variable between the two versions - i.e. call to action, image, placement of button. Once your initial A/B test is concluded, you can create another variant.
Read the step-by-step guide on how to create an A/B test in Google Analytics.