Updating your website – before SEO

I hear and read “SEO” in every website creative brief sent to me these days, and that is to be expected. But to make it the #1 priority AND the #1 task in updating an existing website is not where the focus should be.

SEO…yeah, fine, we’ll get to that. (Pssst! Don’t tell anyone, but SEO is implied. It’s like telling your surgeon “don’t kill me.”) What I feel is easier and more important to your customers/clients/users is “signs of life.” SEO is (in short) used to help search engines index your site and its pages properly so that people can find you when they search. So, let’s leave SEO alone for now and make our first step in updating your site to add some signs of life and show people that you are still in business.

Here are a few places I look first to see if your business’s website is telling me that you are still in business:

• I scroll straight to the footer to see what year is listed there. As a customer: if I see “2006″, you can safely bet that I am doubting you are still in business. TIP: update the year in your footer (on all pages.) You should do this every January. Or you can install a jQuery plugin that will automatically check the current year and update it for you, like this one from Forrst. Personally, I think these should be manually updated so that if/when you one day abandon your website it doesn’t look like it is still current. But, that’s just me.
• Is there a Twitter feed? A good, working Twitter feed showing 1-3 of your latest posts can be used to show signs of life. That is, if your latest post was within the past 30 days. If you are not using Twitter at least once a week, then adding a Twitter feed is not very useful. TIP: This is not only to show users you still maintain the site and talk about relevant topics and share important links, but also to drive traffic to your website. (More on this in a later post.)
• The other thing I am looking for is links to any social media and bookmarking outlets, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, even Yelp. If I see links to these, but a year of “2002″ at the bottom of the page, I can ignore the old year and figure you at least touched the site within the past 2 years when linking to these sites became mainstream. But still, you are making me guess here; a lot can happen to your business in 2 years. TIP: Unless you are 14 years old, or an emerging band with no money, or from another planet, drop MySpace. I hate to sound so black and white, but no one is using it anymore. Businesses have moved on to Facebook and Twitter and other outlets. Even YouTube is being shunned for classier video outlets like Vimeo.

So, that’s the short list. As a customer, I am likely going to give your page about 3 seconds of my time. It’s all about perception: If you don’t appear to be in business, then I assume you are not in business and I leave. Today, there are hundreds, if not thousands of people selling the same thing you are: Why should I waste my time trying to figure out if you are still in business when I can hit the back button and find another website to buy from? Think about the above three things as a broken window, trash, and graffiti on your brick and mortar storefront. You wouldn’t let your walk-in customers see a neglected storefront, so why let the website be treated like the old bike behind the shed?

You don’t have to do a complete redesign to tell people you are still in business. Simply correcting the date and any outdated information is a good start. Even adding a link to your Twitter account can do wonders for letting people know you are current and still here. See: two simple steps that you can do in an evening, and you are back in business. Later we can give the site an overhaul.