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Improving Website Value: How to Provide Value to Your Website Absolutely Free
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The SEO Proposal Template That Will Get You Better Clients
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You’ve picked an awesome niche. You’ve purchased an exact match domain. If there was any justice in the world, your site would be a goldmine in the making.
But despite the odds, you keep running into the same problem:
Every time you look at your ad revenue, you can’t help but feel like your site should be making more. And even though you want to scale and increase your website value, you don’t exactly have an endless pool of money to draw from.
The good news is that it only takes a few changes to sell a website for a significant sum of money. And the better news is that many of these value-boosting adjustments can be done for free.
Are you ready to turn your website into a first-class marketing asset? Read on to see how you can start making your site more valuable.
Run an Audit
If you want to turn your website into the best version of itself, it’s important to make sure that you understand what you’re up against. By our count, there are at least three things you’ll want to assess as you look for ways to increase your site value.
1. Your Website Traffic
Quick history lesson.
Back in the early 2000s, SEO was the marketing version of shooting fish in a barrel. You could write an article about fried chicken, and as long as your keywords were in the right place, you could get your post to show up for the words “buying new sneakers”.
When Google decided to roll out its 2012 algorithm update, a lot of website owners saw their rankings and their traffic tank overnight.
In the present, your situation might not be that dramatic, but it does speak to the importance of revisiting your traffic stats. Are you seeing a consistent downturn? What keywords are people searching for when they find you?
If you can get a sense of what people are looking for, it becomes a lot easier to make sure that your website is meeting, and exceeding, expectations.
2. Formalize Your Website Metrics
In marketing, it’s easy for people to start speaking in buzzwords. But when you get into the habit of using generalities and fuzzy language, it becomes a lot harder to answer questions like, “Have we succeeded in making our site more valuable?”.
The metrics you need will largely depend on your website’s business model.
If you’ve got a content-driven site, some statistics to keep track of would include your bounce rate and the time people are spending on your site. However, if you’re more of an ecommerce site, conversion rates may be your primary concern.
Regardless of the exact metrics you settle on, however, here’s the bottom line:
When you’re taking on a website improvement project, it’s important to have an objective standard that you can point to. The more specific you can get with your standards of success, the more accurate your assessments will be.
3. Evaluate Your Fundamentals
Buying a website is like buying a house. Almost nobody is going to pay full market price for a fixer-upper that needs a new kitchen and new plumbing.
Why? Because the cost of repairs has to be factored into the final purchase price.
Website buyers will more than likely use a similar logic when they evaluate your site. Modern users have certain expectations around the way they want their sites to look and feel.
Is your site intuitive? Are people clicking way too many links to find what they’re looking for? Is your site offline more often than it’s online?
In the same way that tightened doorknobs and a new coat of paint can bump up your home’s resale value, a design makeover can make your website more valuable overnight.
Refine Your Monetization Strategy
Although the exact details may vary, website values are often calculated by multiplying several months’ worth of revenue. As such, you can often command a higher asking price simply by making more money through your site. If you’re wondering what that might look like, we’ve got your two main options covered here:
1. Increase Your Average Order Value
The Corporate Finance Institute defines average order value, or AOV, as the average amount of money that customers spend on your site. If you’ve only got one flagship product or if your offer is otherwise quite narrow, you might be reading this suggestion and wondering if this is even possible. But believe it or not, you have more control over this than you think.
For instance, you can try:
- Offering a product that complements your primary offering
- Adding an affordably priced cheat sheet or printout that customers can use
- Providing a paid option that relates to your site niche
- Selling a physical product
- Using affiliate links
Here’s an example of how this might work.
Let’s say that your site is about knitting and that your primary product is a set of next-level knitting patterns. You can increase your average order value by making additional pattern bundles, writing a manual, or selling knitting needles, among other options.
If you want to increase revenues, getting your current buyers to spend more is a simple and straightforward strategy.
2. Change Ad Providers
Is your website traffic consistent? Do you have a lot of content up on your site? Depending on the stage your site is in, increasing your monthly income could be as simple as finding a higher-paying ad network.
Some companies will have minimum traffic requirements. Others will want your site to be in a certain niche or for you to have a certain amount of content published. Even if it turns out that you’re not eligible for ads just yet, however, it never hurts to be aware of your options.
Optimize Your Marketing
At this stage, you’ve made your website more valuable to you and your potential buyers by auditing and making improvements. And then after covering those fundamentals, you’ve increased your site’s revenue potential. Now all you have to do is start bringing more people to your site.
There are at least three low-cost steps you can take to level up your traffic-generating methods:
1. Increase Your Website Authority
Have you ever wondered how the sites like Wikipedia and WebMD are always on the first page of Google? In many cases, the difference with these sites is that they have domain authority. Or put another way, Google trusts these sites to deliver the content that people want to conume.
We talk elsewhere about homepage SEO and the importance of imitating the link profile of major brands. But there’s another huge benefit to earning Google’s seal of search engine approval — once you’ve built trust around your brand, it becomes a lot easier to rank your other pages for keywords.
2. Refresh, Revise, and Expand Your Content
Writing SEO-friendly content is a balancing act for website owners. On the one hand, you need to use research, keywords, and skill to ensure that search engines understand what the page is about. But at the same time, your content needs to be interesting enough that people want to read it.
This is where it pays to have a dedicated content strategy.
If your first few published articles were badly written or a bit shallow, you can go back and make a few corrections. Or, if that’s not you and you’ve got a masterpiece that’s in need of updating, you can update the page while adding more of the information your readers want.
Are certain pieces of content doing extremely well on your site? Does the content feel a bit shallow? If you can perfect the art of writing engaging content that accurately reflects your keyword intent, your site will be able to attract more people while putting more money into your pocket.
3. Get More Active on Social Media
According to DataReportal, marketers had a potential advertising reach of 436.4 million Twitter users in January 2022. In addition, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok combined attract millions and billions of users every month.
If you were to pay for that kind of reach, chances are that your advertising bills would be absurdly expensive. But in practice, posting on social media is free.
It can take time to build an audience that’s interested in reading what you have to say. Once you’ve built up that platform, however, you’ll have another source of low-cost traffic at your disposal.
Use These Tips to Boost Your Website Value
Whether you’re an ecommerce company that wants to drum up more sales or a site owner who’s looking to sell, it’s important to maximize your website value. But between search engine algorithms, fickle traffic sources, and the need for more content, giving your site the TLC it deserves isn’t easy.
That’s where we come in.
From backlinking to SEO strategy, our team specializes in helping websites boost their search engine rankings. Sign up for your free 7-day trial today.
