By Dolly Draze
Let’s take the “home” in “homepage” a little more seriously. Your website is a conversation starter, a sales tool, and like a parking garage, often your first impression and customer touchpoint. It deserves your attention and regular updates.
We spend hours setting up and managing programs to drive traffic to our websites through branding, search engine optimization (SEO), paid ads, and backlinks from other sites, only to lose people to vague messaging and outdated pages or because the wrong audience landed there!
A good website doesn’t just exist — it works. It guides, informs, and converts anonymous visitors to named leads. It is a living entity that is a critical component of our go-to-market strategies and needs constant attention to drive value.
To do that, you need to optimize content and website structure for balance, authenticity, clarity, and creativity.
The SEO trap
Yes, SEO is important. Optimizing your site to become more visible to search engines and those searching for products and services you provide is key to growth. But how you do it matters far more than if you do it.
In the early days of SEO, simply cramming as many relevant keywords into your site as possible could land you on the first page of search results. But Google has evolved, and with it, so have the rules. Google optimization is now the standard because Google maintains nearly 90% of the search engine market share.
The acronym E-E-A-T is a good rule of thumb when optimizing for search engines: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. In addition to artificial intelligence (AI) snippets pulling content from your pages to display overviews at the top of search engine results pages, Google now ranks pages that show real human value. This means you now have to pay closer attention to content merit and prove you know what you’re talking about and why people should trust you.
How has SEO evolved?
It’s no longer just technical terms and keyword density. Today’s SEO needs to be:
• Audience-friendly: Use words your customers actually say; think long-tail keywords or phrases that people might use when searching.
• Value-driven: Every page of your website should solve a problem or answer a question.
• Conversational: Your content should feel like it’s written by a person, not a bot.
In short, think like a user, not a search engine. If people can find value and navigate your site easily, rankings will follow.
Key considerations when optimizing your entire website
If your website is meant to be a business tool (and it should be), here are some non-negotiables:
• Clearly explain your services: No buzzwords. No fluff. If someone can’t understand what you do in 10 seconds, rewrite it.
• Let your brand personality shine: Using colors, tone, and photos, your website should feel like you. If you took your logo off the homepage, would anyone still know it’s you?
• Track behavior: Use tools like heatmaps and traffic analytics to see where people click, scroll, or drop off. Keep improving hot and cold spots.
• Fresh eyes: Show your site to someone unfamiliar with your business. Ask them what you do. If they can’t answer confidently, you have work to do. You can also try this with a new recruit!
• Don’t get lost in the upgrades: It’s easy to get obsessed with optimization and forget why you built your site in the first place. Sit down with your team and ask: Does it still reflect our goals?
• Optimize for AI: AI search and agents are being used more frequently to help people find answers. It’s time to get your website AI ready.
• Audit: And of course, you still must run SEO audits to check for broken links, duplicate content, or missing metadata.
Your website is the digital doorway into your company, so don’t let your visitors walk away without learning something about you. Keep working on your free real estate, and when the right visitor comes around, you’ll be ready to close the deal.
DOLLY DRAZE is the marketing manager for Get My Parking and a contributing member of the Parketing Collective. She can be reached at [email protected], while the collective can be reached at [email protected].
