For many of us, the new year means setting new ambitious goals but also finally getting some of those backburner projects off and running. With clients, we see it all the time: “We’ve finally gotten around to thinking about X – can you help?”
Here are a few projects to put on your radar that will pay dividends in 2020.
Improving your Information Architecture / User Experience
Many of the biggest digital gains are actually fairly easy to do. Most sites that have been around for a while are fairly susceptible to sprawl. As we wrote last time, it’s frighentingly easy for sites to get cluttered and confusing. One of the easiest things you can do – and best ROI investments – is to take a hard, fresh look at your site architecture and put yourselves in the user’s shoes. Clarifying and simplifying a site – especially with an eye toward whatever conversion goal you’re shooting for – whether it’s B2B leads or B2C conversions – is one of the best moves you can make. Simplifying menus, reducing options, and jettisoning extraneous information can radically improve conversions. All the more so in an age of mobile-first browsing where user’s time on site (and patience for walls of text) is shrinking. Happily, fixing your site’s information architecture is one of the most budget-friendly moves you can make, usually requiring minimal investment and a fresh set of eyes to help provide some additional perspective. It also reflects the old truism that the best source of new business are the customers (or site visitors) you already have.
Nailing the Fundamentals of SEO and Organic Search
It’s hard to imagine in 2020 that we’re *still* talking about SEO. But with the decline of organic reach on most social platforms (we’re looking at you, Facebook) and with rising prices for paid search, many companies are turning back to content and organic search as a way to drive consistent, profitable traffic. This is particularly true for companies in less commoditized markets where they have products or service that are focused, niche, and unique.
Sure the old days of keyword stuffing are long gone (thank goodness) and Google’s algorithm is harder than ever to game, but the fact remains that quality content still works. The biggest challenge we find with most clients is failing to systematically identify which types of content — an which topics — are likely to work well. A well-designed process that helps develop great content is still a winner in 2020.
Paying Attention to Website Schemas
Website schemas aren’t the sexiest topic. But if you’ve happened to notice Google’s changes to search results in the past year, you’ve bumped up against the reason why they are increasingly important. Have you noticed, for example, the rise of short question-and-answer style results in your google search results? With the indexing giant focusing more and more on search intent, you will if you haven’t already. Be prepared for more search results yielding small rich snippets of information. What this means is that those sites that have optimized for this format will have an advantage, and that ultimately comes down to taking advantage of the schema that supports them.
Finding Profitable Paid Traffic
For all of the gnashing of teeth about rising paid search and social costs, these channels can still be enormously profitable (there is a reason why Google and Facebook generate as much ad revenue as they do). It’s not that they no longer work for advertisers, but rather that finding consistently profitable traffic has become more challenging. For most of our clients we’ve simply had to work harder and test more in order to build campaigns that work (of course, once you’ve cracked the code the results can be fantastic). So if you’ve been thinking about testing paid search and social in 2020 our advice is to start smaller earlier, and generate the key learnings and insights that will get you to profitable traffic more quickly. For most organizations, the real cost lies in continuing to ignore these channels.
Ditching the Legacy Infrastructure
Ah, the legacy website. There is nothing more frustrating – for clients or developers both – than having to constantly wrestle a legacy site in order to accomplish even basic goals. At some point it’s just not worth it, in terms of frustration and the hours (and cost) involved. If you’ve been thinking about ditching that crumbling, legacy site, 2020 is a good time to do so. Whether you are an ecommerce company selling directly to your customers, or you are in the business of generating prospects for future sales there are great options for building a modern webstack that’s fast, intuitive, and reliable. So if you are at the breaking point – in terms of frustration or budget – take a look at ditching that sinking boat. Your team, your boss, your developers, and your customers will thank you.
Boosting Your Brand
There is never a bad time to freshen up the look and feel of your website (or the brand it represents, for that matter). Of course actually getting around to doing it is another matter. A redesign can be a daunting endeavor, but continuing to put it off can be costly too, particularly in a competitive environment where your prospective customers are doing a lot of head-to-head comparison. Our advice — other than to just get started — is to see if you can roll it into another project. If you’re jumping to a new webstack, that’s often a great time to capitalize and give your brand a refresh as well. Or if you are running some new paid social campaigns, that can be a great time to quickly and cheaply test out new positioning and value propositions. While we tend to think of a brand refresh as a complete overhaul, it can actually be most helpful to break it up into smaller parts and work iteratively toward the desired end-state. If you’ve been putting it off, 2020 might be the year to knock it off your list.
Replace the Footer Date
Of course, if all else fails, and you can’t make headway on any other part of your digital project list, at least update the date in your website footer. 🙂