Essential Website Updates to Boost User Engagement and SEO Performance
- Michael Fox
- Sep 5, 2025
- 9 min read
Updated: Nov 6, 2025
Unlocking Website Potential Through Website Optimization and Continuous Improvement Strategies
If there’s one place where first impressions are absolutely critical, it’s your website! We’re not just talking about design and content. Up-to-date content, an effective SEO strategy, and fast load speeds are vital for your website's success.
What is Website Optimization?
Website optimization is the process of improving your site to make it more effective at achieving your goals. These goals may include attracting more visitors, increasing engagement, or driving sales. This process involves enhancing various aspects of your site, including design, content, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and load speed.
Optimizing your website is crucial. It helps search engines understand and index your site better, making it more likely to appear in search results. This increases your site's visibility, brings in more relevant traffic, and helps you reach your target audience more effectively.
In today's fast-moving digital landscape, websites can quickly become outdated if neglected. If you lack the time or resources to maintain your website, signing up for a web designer's low-cost monthly maintenance plan is one solution. Alternatively, engaging a website optimization specialist like Orbit Media can ensure your business captures its unique qualities. This will help maintain a high-performing website that answers consumer questions, overcomes objections, and promotes your business at the forefront of search engine results.
Small business owners face many challenges! Running and promoting a business can be tough, especially in the aftermath of Covid and with relentless price increases. Limited or no funds to invest in an effective Website Optimization Strategy can make things even harder. Your website is often the first point of contact with prospective customers online. It represents and promotes your business, making it a valuable, low-cost marketing tool that must be cared for and kept up to date.
If your website is underperforming and fits this profile, and you want to see improvements, read on to unlock your website's full potential. This article is for you!
A website's main purpose is to promote a business and generate leads. If it fails to meet this basic criterion, justifying any investment made in a website becomes difficult! Limited marketing budgets often lead to poor-performing websites, resulting in neglected sites that serve no real benefit to a business.
The success of a website as a company's number one sales promotional tool on the Internet will only succeed if owners understand the importance and function of a website. Here are some facts to consider:
A recent survey by Orbit Media, a Chicago-based website optimization specialist, uncovered some interesting insights:
Knowing how to unlock your website's full potential requires skill, time, planning, and strategy. Before you begin, ask yourself the following questions:
Does your website meet your expectations, or is it outdated?
Does your website reflect your current brand/business?
When did you last update any of the content on your website?
Have you experienced a decline in sales and inquiries over time?
When was the last time you checked your keyword targeting and overall SEO strategy?
How to Update a Website
Updating your website can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be! Here are some steps to guide you through the process:
Review Your Current Content and Design
Check Your Website’s Data
Evaluate Your Site Against Your Primary Competitors’ Websites
Optimize Your SEO
Review Your Current Content and Design
The first step in updating your website is to evaluate your current site thoroughly. At this point, you’re not creating new content but investigating what works well and what doesn’t. Is the content relevant to your target audience? This will help you create a clear list of details that need changing or improving.
Visual Content
Check the quality and relevance of your visual assets, such as images and videos. Identify anything that looks blurry, pixelated, or generally outdated. You may come across images that are no longer relevant or aren’t aligned with your current brand identity.
In these instances, you won’t necessarily have to delete the images altogether. Instead, consider using online media editing tools to enhance them. Also, take note of your website’s loading speed. Old video files may be overly heavy, negatively impacting your site’s user experience.
Written Content
In addition to visual content, scan through the written website content. Look for broken links, missing or incorrect information, and ensure the content presents your message and brand effectively. Does it provide answers to visitors' questions and overcome their objections?
For example, you may have old blog posts that no longer serve a purpose or mission statements that don’t quite resonate with your brand’s language. Perhaps you could provide more details on a specific product or service or reword general paragraphs using AI. Improving the text on your call-to-action button can also generate more clicks. Instead of saying "Get in touch," try "Get a quote!"
Check Your Website’s Data
In addition to surveying your site from the front end, look into your own website analytics. This will help you understand your audience’s behaviour and how you can tailor your site to better fit their needs.
Integrating tracking tools and analytics into your Wix website will enable you to monitor your site’s traffic. You’ll be able to check important information, such as which pages are the most popular, how much time visitors spend on each page, and what your bounce rates are (meaning how many visitors left your site without interacting with it at all).
Once you understand your customers’ behaviour better, take it a step further by analysing why they may act the way they do. If many visitors are leaving a certain page without engaging, consider what is different about that page. Does it have more text than others? Does it take longer to load? Insights like these will help you make informed decisions when updating your website.
Evaluate Your Primary Competitors’ Websites
Research the Competition:
Look closely at your top competitors’ websites. Pay attention to their design, navigation, content, and marketing strategies. Keep an eye out for common industry practices, such as creating a blog or an online store. These insights will help your website redesign meet (or even surpass) the competition.
A great starting point is to initiate an online presence audit. This will establish your current ranking on search engines like Google against your primary competitors. If done correctly, the results will provide valuable insights to base remedial actions on to improve performance.
Knowledge is power! The audit's valuable data enables owners to make informed decisions about web design and SEO improvements to boost performance and leads. Running a business always comes with challenges, especially related to marketing. Don't expect to figure out the perfect marketing strategy overnight; it requires continual work and refinement.
It's not all doom and gloom, though! There are areas within the owner's grasp to overcome a poor-performing website without incurring unnecessary costs. The following headings provide key poor performance indicators for site owners to investigate.
Optimize Your SEO
Last but certainly not least, remember that you want your target audience to easily find you on search engines like Google. You may have already worked on improving your SEO in the past, but it’s worth reviewing it as you revamp your website. You’ll have new images for which you should write alt text, plus additional pages that will require optimized URLs.
A good place to start is by conducting keyword research. Keywords are two-to-five-word phrases that potential customers would type into search engines when looking for a business like yours. To increase your chances of ranking higher, take a look at these professional free SEO tools that will help you find the right words and phrases to target through your website.
Key Poor Performance Indicators
Maintaining your website is one of the most overlooked and underappreciated tasks that can significantly impact lead generation, data security, and corporate perception. There are many reasons a website becomes outdated. Below are some indicators that identify the cause of poor performance, with solutions provided at the end.
WEBSITE MARKETING INDICATOR
Poor Performance
You have an existing Wix website that has been neglected and needs attention.
Your existing site isn't converting or meeting your performance expectations.
There are no integrated marketing tools active on-site to promote your products or services.
Search engine results are poor, and your site ranking is low or non-existent.
WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT INDICATOR
Inadequate Budgeting
You want to improve your online presence and visibility to get found by search engines.
You want to connect with your customers, automate your workflow, and drive more traffic to your site.
You want to attract more customers but realise this is not an easy task.
You want to increase your market share and set your company apart from your primary competitors.
WEBSITE FUNCTIONALITY INDICATOR
Lack of Strategy Commitment
Your existing site lacks functionality related to your product offering.
You're searching for a specific bespoke system unique to your business.
You've built an internal business tool that you'd like to bring to market and sell to consumers.
You would like to add unique functionality to demonstrate your product benefits.
WEBSITE CONTENT INDICATOR
Ignoring Your Website
A recent HubSpot survey revealed that 42% of marketers admitted to making improvements to their website once a year or less!
Think about the last time your company underwent a website redesign or online audit. How did it feel after the site launch? If like most people, there’s a good chance the final product was liked, but the process of getting to that point was complex, time-consuming, and expensive.
The main focus of your website service should be to evaluate, maintain, update, and improve the site. These actions will contribute to improved performance, greater online visibility, and better search engine results. Don't neglect your company website or let it stagnate!
Solutions
Checking the Functional Status of Your Current Website to Unlock Its Full Potential
Before getting started, refer to your answers about what a website is for, and be crystal clear about what's expected and what you want the website to achieve. Here are some useful tips to consider when creating a professional, high-performing website:
Set practical, achievable, realistic goals that add value and stimulate demand.
Select a reliable website builder, such as WixStudio.com.
Start by using a (bespoke) blueprint frame tailored to your business activity.
Create a home landing page.
Associate the domain name with your business brand.
Gather dynamic content to use on the site.
Set page layout, types, and headings.
Add meaningful call-to-action buttons (CTAs).
Design the site with growth in mind (GDD).
Create an SEO strategy plan, then optimise the site for search engines.
Develop a social media strategy.
Register with Google My Business and all local directories.
Ensure the site is mobile-friendly.
The site should be user-friendly with accessibility in mind (ADA).
Ensure all contact forms comply with GDPR.
Keep your privacy policy and trading terms up to date.
Include an accessibility statement.
There is a lot that business owners can action without incurring unnecessary expenses!
Solutions
1. Check Your Current Social Media Channels Strategy
A social media marketing strategy is more important now than ever before. Analyse your current plan and redefine it if necessary, taking into account the shifts and trends in the market. These are uncertain times!
Social media marketing is the act of using social media platforms to promote a brand or product, build an audience, generate leads, and increase sales and website traffic. A great place for inspiration is reading the Wix blog post on social media marketing for small businesses. You'll find some great tips and tricks to get you started!
Solutions
2. Check to See if Your Marketing Efforts Are Integrated
When integrated marketing is done well, your marketing platforms and campaigns are perfectly synced. Your data flows seamlessly to enrich other apps in your stack, and your customers and prospects have a unified view of your brand and service offers.
I[ntegrate your marketing with all your other marketing channels, ensuring they work in harmony to promote your products or services with an aligned brand message across all content and assets.
Solutions
3. Check Your Current Online Presence Ranking on Google
As great as your website and content might be, people need to find you before they can buy anything or contact you. The idea behind the Online Presence Audit is to establish how effective your current online presence is when people use certain search phrases. The process must be simple, intuitive, and straightforward.
The simplest way to go is to use search phrases relevant to your business that potential clients might use to find you. Our approach is to put ourselves in your clients' shoes. For example, if a business is location-based, like "Antonio's Pizza House" on High Street, what are the top ten results that turn up? If it's not location-based, we just enter the business name, like "Olive Tree Gifts," and check what top ten results Google presents.
Achieving a high-performing website can take time and may not produce results overnight, so be patient and keep going until you achieve the desired results. Refer to the Wix blog on SEO for useful tips. If all else fails, consider hiring a web developer.
If you enjoyed this read and found it helpful, I've done my job! Please share it on social media or get in touch for a chat!
Acknowledgements:
HubSpot Marketing
Wix.com
Orbit Media
Updated 09/05/2025
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