In this post its time to take a mid-year evaluation of where you are at, take stock and improve where you can to meet your targets and push beyond them. It may also be time to pivot to a new project.
1 – Evaluate & Adjust Your Goals
Grab some pen and paper, scribble down what you recall your goals to be (or print them off if you’ve got the list) and under each write down simply achieved, not achieved, on the way.
You’re now 50% through the year and it may be time to consider if those goals were right for this year – adjust them and even make yourself more accountable to them or add new goals – so here are a few ideas for ways to do just that, some adjustments or goals you can add:
- Make it specific: traffic, revenue, roi, sales, subscribers, money raised, direct interactions etc
- Objective feedback: design, site authority, employee lifestyle etc
The reason to do this is not just to “check up” but because we do get stuck in a rut of own making, we get comfortable and we don’t want to budge from there. Re-evaluating goals can be the kick up the backside you need to relight your passion if it’s dropped off or simply the push you need to reach those longer term goals.
2 – Get Your Site Health Checked
You’d expect me to say spend money on this, after all SEO Andy sells services but I am not about to do that. SImply hop over to Website Grader and enter your website address (no need for your email) and you’ll get a simple little report, giving you major issues to fix and some less major ones.
Some examples of issues it flags are page speed, meta descriptions, mobile friendliness, site map and general security.
If you spot anything you can’t fix – then seek some help.
3 – Ask Someone To Perform A Task
Often we don’t ask for feedback on website design and function from outside ‘these four walls’ and it really can cause issues. It can cause loss of sales, loss of leads and even visitor retention removal – not to mention in really bad cases loss of ranking.
The best way to test your site is to ask someone (who wouldn’t usually) to do a specific task on a given page, starting on a different page – this means they need to navigate to said page and perform the task. Ask them at each step to give you feedback about how they felt, about the design and whether anything stood in their way – you will be surprised how small things can be road blocks to user accessibility.
Here are a few tasks you could consider:
- Complete the contact form at the bottom of page X, starting from blog post (url: xx)
- Complete the checkout process, buying product X, starting from the homepage and using the search bar
4 – Test Something New
Online Businesses and Blogs often stagnate if you don’t test new things, this can be anything from a new style of content or picture to changing the color of your homepage background to see the impact on click throughs to your shop.
As a user of Google Analytics you can make use of Google Analytics Experiments, a really handy tool built into analytics to make tests on your website.
If you use MailChimp for your emails, simply select AB testing when you create a new campaign, many platforms make this really simple.