The first thing we suggest during your digital spring cleaning is revamping your website. There are more businesses with an online presence than ever before as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. It's important to have a website that still stands out from the crowd. For many businesses, your website is your first impression to potential clients or customers. You want to put your best foot forward and showcase your business in the best light. There are many websites available that can scan, analyze, and grade your website based on things like speed, SEO, performance, design, and more. If your results are not what you were hoping for, it's time to get to work and start making edits and improvements throughout the site. If you work with a digital marketing agency, they can identify problems, suggest changes, and implement solutions for you. Here are a few ways to improve a website:

• Add More Visuals! A picture is worth a thousand words, so use images on your pages often! Include pictures or videos of your company, your products/services, your employees, your clients, and industry-related photos. Be sure to keep an eye on loading time as more visuals can make pages take longer to load (this is not good).
  
  
• Make It Interactive! Consumers LOVE interactive websites! Whenever possible, give the user something to do. Create slideshows to scroll through, before and afters with sliders, clickable images that cause something to happen, etc. Not only will interactive elements help set your site apart from others, it will also keep consumers engaged and encourage them to dive deeper into the website to find more fun things to do! Some of the most popular websites have that reputation solely because they're interactive and entertaining. Don't believe us? Check out https://pointerpointer.com/. It's completely pointless (pun intended), but good for hours of fun!
  
  
• Clean Up Your Navigation. One of the best upgrades you can make to your website is a cleaner navigation. Put yourself in the shoes of your consumer; how frustrating is it when you find a promising company, head to their website, and then can't find what you're looking for? Make sure to highlight all of the most important pages on the main navigation tab with subpages as needed. Throughout your site, include buttons, links, clickable images, and CTAs that lead directly to relevant pages. The less scrolling and hunting consumers need to do, the better!
  
  
• Optimize For SEO. Lastly, you want to optimize your website for SEO purposes. Search Engine Optimization is important for long-term digital success. When you have a site built by a digital marketing agency, they will usually handle the SEO optimization automatically. It never hurts to take a look to make sure things aren't falling to the wayside. Are your pages filled with relevant keywords that Google will rank you on? Do you use headings and body text to help Google bots identify the key topics on each page? Do you have frequently-update blog posts with even more keywords? This is a great time to check!

If you really want to clean house, it's time to take a look back into your social media pages. Businesses change and grow as time goes on, and your digital presence has likely seen a shift or two since you launched the account. It's important to scroll through your account to make sure all of your posts are clean, consistent, and represent your brand well. If you hire a new marketing person or switch to a new digital marketing agency, there is probably an area of posts that clearly show that shift. If you're happy with the posts you have no, don't be afraid to delete or archive older ones. You may not think that it's worth it, but you would be shocked by how many consumers scroll to the bottom of Instagram and Facebook accounts. If they see inconsistent branding, poor-quality images, or other less-than-ideal posts, they may lose trust in your company. Take a few days to delete or archive social media posts that do not show your business in the best light. You don't want to delete every old post, just the worse ones. Business accounts with more posts from way back are seen as more established. If you delete your entire history, you may disrupt your social reputation.

This is a great time to start working on your branding if necessary! When was the last time you went over your brand guide to make sure everything reflects the mission and vision of the company? While fundamental aspects of brand tend to stay consistent, there are some things that should be brought up to date more frequently than others. For example, consider changing the fonts you use on websites and content if yours seems outdated. Slowly introduce new or variations of colors. Incorporate some elements that fit with your brand such as shapes, lines, layouts, etc. Do you have new rules about what you want to create social media posts about? While it's almost never a good idea to change branding abruptly (especially if you're a larger and well-established brand), but you can slowly change your style to better fit your business in its current state. BusySeed just redid our brand guide early last year to add some new colors for internal use, new posting guidelines, new fonts and hierarchy, and more! Many people forget that branding starts within so they ignore internal guidelines. It's extremely difficult to communicate your brand to other people (i.e. your digital marketing agency) when you don't fully understand it yourself. Top digital marketing agencies will be willing and able to sit down with you and help you create or finetune your brand guide as needed. They know the ins and outs of branding, so don't be afraid to ask them for help.