Over
the years, I've built a system for website revitalization. It varies
slightly between business types, but it remains resilient in structure from
one to the other.
I call it the Sweet Spot Method. Roughly, this is how it works.
The web design sweet spot. Every business has a limited
budget to spend on their website design work. To spend money
wisely, you should know what parts of the design effort pay most
dividends. Some things have been shown to be worthless, while
others are very helpful. Striking a balance between the
aesthetic dreams of a designer and the pragmatic demands of past lessons
is the web design sweet spot.
The content creation sweet spot. Web content is
critical to the success of any site, both in the search engines and in
consumers' minds. Creation of this content must be both useful and
worth reading as well as search engine friendly. Striking the
balance between the two is the content sweet spot.
The pay-per-click sweet spot. What position in the pay
per click results gives you the best return on your investment. It
may be #6, it may be #1. Which pay-per-click search engine offers
the best performance for your business? Yahoo? Google?
Miva? How often should you split test your ads? What is your
maximum reasonable conversion rate? When should you stop
tinkering? Finding the perfect keyword set, ad copy, ad
position, daily budget, and landing pages is what I call finding the
pay-per-click sweet spot.
The content update sweet spot. Some businesses want to
maintain their entire website themselves, something I encourage.
Others want to outsource it completely, which can also work if the
budget supports it. But there's more to updating a website than
adding the latest press release or new employee. To maintain well
ranked, you must always keep search engines in mind. Finding a
balance between "free reign" updating and SEO sensibility is what I call
the content update sweet spot.
The interactive features sweet spot. How interactive
should your site be? Should you blog? Should your site carry RSS
feeds of news in your industry? How about a podcast? For
many companies, one makes sense while the others don't.
Somewhere in the collection of new media offerings is the perfect
combination for you and your company, which I call the interactive
features sweet spot.