Don’t judge by its cover, they said. But in the digital world, first impressions are formed within seconds. Thoughtful corporate website designs together with a brand presence on social media create a strong brand identity online.
And a brand identity that immediately conveys professionalism, trustworthiness, and credibility, sets the stage for positive interactions with your brand.
Further, a well-maintained website helps companies thrive in the digital era by gaining organic recognition, delivering positive customer experiences, and driving long-term success.
By prioritizing website maintenance, corporate brands can forge meaningful connections with their customers and solidify their position in the market.
And this is why we like to document (via this blog) various website maintenance strategies for corporate branding in the following sections.
Continue reading further.
How Corporate Branding Influences Website Design and Content?
A corporate website is an online platform created and maintained by a business or corporation to communicate with various stakeholders, including customers, investors, partners, and employees. It serves as the digital face of the company and is an essential part of its overall marketing and branding strategy.
Corporate branding profoundly influences website design and content by shaping the website’s visual identity, voice, user experience, and messaging.
Only through regular website maintenance can any company establish a cohesive and consistent brand presence online to strengthen its overall corporate identity and establish trust with the audience.
Running short of website design ideas? Get Top Business Website Design Ideas & Inspiration.
Challenges Faced Due to Neglected Website Maintenance
Website maintenance is a proactive process of regularly monitoring, updating, and managing a website to ensure its adaptation to technology changes, optimal performance, security, user experience, and evolving legal compliance.
It involves various tasks, including content updates, software and plugin updates, security checks, bug fixes, performance optimization, and ensuring compatibility with different devices and browsers.
Common challenges faced due to neglected website maintenance
- Security Vulnerabilities
- Website Downtime and Performance Issues
- Broken Links and Error Pages
- Outdated Content and Information
- Outdated Design and User Interface
- Poor Search Engine Rankings
- Negative User Experience
- Tech Compatibility Issues
- Loss of Business Opportunities
- Negative Impact on Brand Image
Check out here how we improved the online brand presence of a US-based Energy company through consistent website maintenance.
Key Strategies for Effective Corporate Website Maintenance
A well-maintained website plays a crucial role in shaping positive brand perception. It showcases a brand’s professionalism, trustworthiness, and commitment to providing an excellent user experience. A positive brand perception, in turn, can lead to increased customer loyalty, higher brand affinity, and improved business success.
- Regular Content Updates
- Ensure Website Security
- Mobile Responsiveness and User Experience
- Monitor and Fix Broken Links
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Maintenance
- Review and Enhance Call-to-Action (CTA) Elements
- Update Plugins and Software
I. Regular Content Updates
Keeping your website content fresh and up-to-date is vital for engaging visitors and optimizing your corporate website for search engines. Here’s how you can go about it
- Create a content calendar to plan and schedule regular updates, such as blog posts, product announcements, thought leadership, and news articles.
- Update existing content to reflect the current marketing landscape and publish it as a new version.
- Ensure that the content aligns with your brand voice and addresses the needs of your target audience.
- Remember to promote your new content through your social media channels, email newsletters, and other marketing efforts to maximize its reach and impact.
Get all your questions answered here – FAQ on SEO content marketing.
II. Ensure Website Security
Enhancing website security is an ongoing process that requires vigilance and proactive measures. Here’s how you should go about website maintenance for securing your corporate website from vulnerable situations
- Implementing an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate on your corporate website will secure communication between your users and your server, protecting their personal information during login or checkout processes, thereby contributing to responsible corporate branding practices.
- Enable multi-factor authentication for user accounts with administrative privileges, ensuring that unauthorized individuals cannot access critical parts of your website.
- Implement a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect your corporate website from malicious attacks, such as SQL injection attempts, that could lead to data breaches or unauthorized access.
- Opt for a hosting provider that offers features like regular server updates, firewall protection, and intrusion detection to bolster your website’s security.
- Good website maintenance practices include scheduling monthly security audits to assess your website’s security posture and prevent potential cyberattacks and data breaches.
- Further, set up automated, daily backups of your website’s data to a remote server or cloud storage provider. This ensures you can quickly recover from any data loss or security breach.
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III. Mobile Responsiveness and User Experience
74%
Visitors are likely to come back to your site if it has good mobile UX – Source
Mobile responsiveness and user experience are dynamic aspects of website design that directly impact how users interact with your corporate website on various devices, especially smartphones, and tablets. Here’s a list to note
- Check that your website works consistently across different browsers.
- Check font sizes and their readability.
- Use responsive images that adjust to different screen sizes, maintaining visual quality without sacrificing performance.
- Verify that the menu is easy to access and use, with clear and concise labels.
- Review interactive elements, such as buttons and links, to ensure they are easily tappable and spaced adequately to prevent accidental taps.
- Evaluate forms on mobile devices to ensure they are easy to complete.
- Monitor and optimize website speed on both desktop and mobile devices.
- Explore opportunities to leverage mobile-specific features, such as click-to-call buttons for easy contact or geolocation for personalized content delivery.
At ColorWhistle, we applied manual speed optimization techniques to decrease load time from 5.82 sec to 2.50 sec for a UK-based client in the hospitality industry.
Click to read the full case study and get inspired for optimizing the user experience on your corporate website!
IV. Monitor and Fix Broken Links
Monitoring and fixing broken links is an important aspect of website maintenance as it directly impacts user experience and search engine optimization (SEO). Here’s how to monitor and fix broken links during website maintenance
1. Monitoring Broken Links:
- Use Website Crawling Tools: Utilize website crawling tools like Screaming Frog, Xenu Link Sleuth, or Google Search Console to scan your website for broken links. These tools will identify any URLs that return a 404 error or other status codes indicating broken links.
- Regularly Check Internal and External Links: Ensure that both internal links (links within your website) and external links (links to other websites) are functional.
- Monitor User-Generated Content: If your website includes user-generated content, such as comments or forum posts, keep an eye on these sections for potential broken links that users might add.
- Set Up Alerts: Use monitoring services or plugins that can send you alerts when broken links are detected on your website. This way, you can address the issue promptly.
Website crawling tool
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- Xenu Link Sleuth [Free]
- W3C Link Checker [Free]
Broken link tool
Monitoring user-generated content
2. Strategies to Fix Broken Links:
- Redirect to Relevant Pages: Suppose you’ve updated the URL structure of your blog posts, and old links are leading to 404 errors. Instead, create a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones to ensure a smooth user experience.
- Update Internal Links: If you’ve changed the URL of a product page, make sure all references and links within your website (e.g., blog posts, related products) now point to the updated URL.
- Remove or Replace Broken External Links: If you’ve linked to an external news article that is no longer available, consider finding an alternative source for the same information or removing the link altogether.
- Fix Misspelled URLs: If you have a blog post that was linked with a misspelled URL, fix the typo to ensure the link works correctly.
- Customize Error Pages: Your custom 404 error page can include a friendly message, site navigation, and a search box, so users are less likely to leave the website when they encounter a broken link.
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V. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Maintenance
Download the Ultimate SEO Checklist as a pdf.
SEO is an ongoing process that involves regular monitoring, analysis, and optimization of various elements on your website and evolving search engine algorithms. Here’s a comprehensive breakdown of SEO maintenance tasks during corporate website maintenance
- Keyword Research and Optimization: After conducting keyword research, you find users performing intent-based searches. In this case, you should now optimize your product page’s meta title and description to include this search intent.
- On-Page Optimization: Updating your blog posts with internal links to relevant product pages and other related blog posts not only improves the internal linking structure of your website but also makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your content.
- Backlink Profile: You can use a backlink analysis tool like Ahrefs to discover that your website has acquired several low-quality and spammy backlinks from unrelated websites. You must disavow these links to prevent them from negatively impacting your website’s SEO.
- Schema Markup: You can implement schema markup on your blog posts, providing search engines with structured data about the problems, solutions, and strategies discussed. This helps search engines display rich snippets in search results, attracting more clicks.
- Competitor Analysis: You can regularly monitor your competitors’ SEO strategies and improvise on their successful content marketing campaigns. You analyze their approach and create a similar campaign with your unique angle to attract more traffic and engagement.
- Local SEO: You must ensure that the name, address, and phone number (NAP) information is consistent across your corporate website, online directories, and Google My Business listing across multiple locations to improve local search rankings.
You may enjoy reading our previous blog on Local SEO For Brands – Beyond ORM And Lead Generation! We have highlighted several perspectives here.
VI. Review and Enhance Call-to-Action (CTA) Elements
CTAs play a crucial role in driving conversions and achieving your business goals.
But observe the above images.
Overcrowding of CTAs may lead to the option of plenty, being unnecessarily more salesy and ultimately confusing the visitor. Here’s how you can review and enhance CTA elements during corporate website maintenance:
- Match CTAs to the Page Content: Ensure that CTAs are relevant to the content on the page. A CTA that aligns with the context of the page is more likely to resonate with visitors.
- Use Different Types of CTAs: Explore various types of CTAs, such as buttons, text links, pop-ups, or inline forms, depending on the content and context.
- Analyze CTA Performance: Regularly analyze click-through rates, conversion rates, and engagement metrics for each CTA to identify which ones are successful and which may need improvement.
- A/B Testing: Perform A/B testing on different variations of CTAs to determine which ones perform better. Test different colors, wording, sizes, and placements to optimize conversions.
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VII. Update Plugins and Software
Regularly update your website’s software, including the content management system (CMS), plugins, and other third-party tools. Software updates often include security patches that address known vulnerabilities.
WordPress website maintenance is simple with no impact on your visitor’s UX. Learn more about WordPress Website Maintenance Mode and its Significance.
Leveraging Social Media for Unified Identity & Brand Engagement
Integrating social media with your website creates a unified corporate identity and enhances user engagement with the brand. Here are some effective ways to leverage social media with your website:
- Social Media Landing Pages: Create dedicated landing pages on your website for specific social media campaigns or promotions. Drive traffic from social media platforms to these pages to increase conversions.
- Social Media Integration in Contact Forms: Add social media profile fields in your website’s contact forms. This allows users to include their social media handles when reaching out to you.
- Social Media Customer Support: Provide links to your social media profiles for customer support inquiries. Many users prefer reaching out on social media platforms for quick responses.
- Embedded Social Feeds: Embed your social media feeds (e.g., Instagram, Twitter, Facebook) directly on your website. This keeps your website updated with fresh content and encourages visitors to engage with your social media posts.
Tips for Maintaining a Consistent Brand Voice Across Social Media Channels
- Establish Corporate Brand Guidelines
- Know Your Target Audience
- Create a Unique Content Style Guide
- Align Visuals with Corporate Brand Identity
- Monitor, Engage, and Respond Consistently
- Stay Authentic and Transparent
Also Read
Looking for Web Development Services?
Seize and experience the transformative impact of Web Development Services & Solutions with ColorWhistle.
Outsourcing to Professional Web Design Teams Can Help
Ignoring website maintenance can have severe consequences on corporate branding. It can erode brand credibility, hinder customer engagement, and negatively impact the overall brand perception.
Therefore, sustaining a strong online presence through consistent website maintenance is not just an option but a necessity in today’s digital landscape.
Outsourcing website maintenance to professional web design teams can be a game-changer for you. Partnering with web design companies like ColorWhistle who understand the nuances of branding and user experience can lead to transformative results.
Our team has the knowledge and tools to implement the latest technologies, ensure search engine optimization, and maintain a seamless user experience across devices.
Moreover, outsourcing website maintenance allows you to tap into our specialized skills without the burden of hiring and managing an in-house team.
Follow this link to get a price quote or call us at +1 (210) 787-3600 anytime!
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