Your website is often the first experience potential customers have with your company so you want to make it count. It’s important that your website stay up to date and create a lasting and powerful impression in order to convert potential customers into actual paying customers.

If your website isn’t working as hard as it can be for you, but you’re not quite ready for a full site redesign, there are a tons of things you can do to give your site an extra boost to elevate your online presence.

1. Edit your content

This is the number 1 way to keep your site strong and doing well. Too many sites have tiny spelling, grammar, or punctuation errors and they are easily missed when launching a new site. Reading over your content again, when you’re not in a hurry, allows you to find mistakes that you missed before. Mistakes aren’t the only thing you should look for, but also additional content that may be necessary. Explain a product better, detail your services more fully, etc. Add anything that makes it easier for the end user to understand and appreciate.

2. Link to social media profiles

If you haven’t already, make sure you link to all social media profiles for your company, and even link to employees social profiles (as long as they are appropriate). Any additional contact with your clients and/or potential clients is a great thing, and the easier they can find you the better. You might chat with someone on twitter for a few months before they are ready to make the jump on a project with you, but that continued social interaction keeps your company at the top of their mind.

3. Keep adding relevant content

Search engines keep crawling through your site to see if you have any new content, so you want to give them something to look for. More new content gives them more things for you to be searched and ranked by which is great for SEO. If you find that you’d like to break your services page up into 4 pages, do it. Continual updates are great for your site.

4. Add dynamic content to your homepage

This can be in the form of a rotating image banner, a video, scrolling quotes, etc. Moving and dynamic content is a great eye-catching trick. It also gives you a way to say more than 1 thing in 1 place without overcrowding the page.

5. Create a call to action on the homepage

Give people a plan, show them what you’d like them to do on your site. If you sell products create a button directing customers to “Check out our products now” or “Get a quote today.” People are more apt to do something if you tell them to do it!

6. Add striking photography

This is a really great way to elevate your site. If you used generic and cheap images when you first launched your site, go back through and find some high quality ones that really add something special to your site. Check out a previous post on this blog where we posted a few great free images to use, or consider finding some on istockphoto.com or veer.com, 2 really great stock photography sites.

7. Make sure your homepage describes what you do

People need to be able to see what it is you do quickly. If they don’t understand, chances are they will leave your site without a second thought. Having a minimal and beautiful homepage without much going on is great, but visitors need to be able to see what they can get from you on the homepage. Don’t make them click to find it, because they won’t.

8. Make sure your services and products are listed and described fully

This doesn’t have to be on the homepage, because you’ll want to make sure it’s detailed and comprehensive. Visitors may be looking for something specific from you and if you don’t list everything you do, they may leave your site thinking you don’t provide it. If your products use technical jargon that the average person might not understand, take that opportunity to list out exactly what it is in layman’s terms.

9. Create a blog

I can’t stress enough how great a blog is for a company. It’s a great way to show you are knowledgeable in the industry and provides potential customers a place to get to know you and what you offer. It’s a nice addition to any site, giving you tons of relevant content for visitors and for search engines.

10. Add something new

There are already a few ideas of new stuff to add to your site, but anything new is a great idea. Maybe there is something specific to your industry that you didn’t quite have time or money for when you first launched your site, but it would certainly create a better site for your company. Now is the time to add that to your site, don’t wait for the next big redesign to implement great new ideas.

It’s important to continually evaluate your site and improve things as you see fit. Maintaining your site should be a never ending process, one that helps your site grow and prosper so that it’s working as hard as it can for you.