Updating Your Website

The dynamic nature of the internet demands that you keep updating your website regularly.

When an existing or potential customer arrives on the website, he or she is expecting the content they are viewing is the most up-to-date information about your business.

It’s better to have no website at all than to have a site that hasn’t undergone maintenance for ages.

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A lot of websites for small businesses, in particular, fall into this category. These days, not updating your site for more than a week is one of the worst things you can do for your online business.

Google and Bing love it when you keep your website fresh with relevant content, and they reward your efforts with higher rankings in search results.

An enormous amount of work has gone into the creation of your website. Whether you did it yourself, or you called the neighbourhood tech geek to do it, or you hired a professional.

That’s why it’s sad when you sit back and expect your website to be active and run forever without updating it.

When updating your website, you need to keep the following in mind:

1. Be specific about what goals you want to meet using your website. For instance, do you want your website to be a lead generator, an online brochure or an e-commerce site?
2. Identify what key performance indicators you will use to gauge the success of your website. For example, will you use phone requests, appointment scheduled, email subscription etc. as a key performance indicator?
3. Get into the nitty-gritty of the techie stuff on your website to make sure your site is responsive, mobile friendly and secure. Review each page, the codes, and link on your website to find outdated codes, missing or duplicate page titles, header tags, meta descriptions, broken internal/external links, sitemap, robots.txt, URL structure, your website speed and performance indicators, etc. right down to any outdated content and spelling errors.

Here’s a summary of how to go about it:

Establish a Schedule

If your site visitors know that you place new content on your site every Wednesday, they’ll visit your website every Wednesday.

But, the type of schedule you set up must be related to the kind of content on your site. A sports website must be updated more often than that of a paper clip manufacturer.

Determine What Needs Updating

Have there been any changes in the management structure of your company? Have you changed your logo or brand colours? Have you changed the nature of your business?

These are some of the things that call for website maintenance.

Find New Content

Finding new content for your site is one of the most important things to keep your site active and relevant on the internet. The need for content is often challenging for most website owners.

Finding new content for your site is the most challenging. But there are two ways to go about it:

Providing New Content Yourself

Here you could consider adding any of following to your website:

• A Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page: Make a list of all the common questions asked by your clients etc. about your product/services and your answers to these questions and upload it to your site.

• News Page: with up to the minute information about your company/industry.

• Links to other Pages: with links to other websites of interest in your niche market or industry.

• Testimonial Page: where you publish feedback given by your clients about your products/services.

Having Your Visitors Provide New Content

You can urge your visitors to give new content for your website and interact with your site by incorporating any of the followings into your site:

• Blog: A blog (such as the one you’re on now) can be added as a plugin to your existing website or incorporated into the site in the design stages. With your blog, it’s best to keep your postings relevant to your niche market. Your site visitors can then read these and add their comments or post their topics.

• Forum: Unlike a blog (which in most cases is more relaxed and informal) a forum is more formal and structured and users are expected to join the online discussion before they can post their comments. But like the blog, you can add a forum to your site as a plugin, or you can include it in the development phase.

Having a blog or forum is time-consuming, and it will take a while to grow your online community.

Until recently, most companies often wrestled with the idea of having a blog or forum because they didn’t like the idea of allowing anyone to add negative comments about its products or website.

It is understandable because no one likes bad press. But by allowing your customers to air their feelings, the result is generally favourable.

What do you think?

Conclusion

All your effort in updating your website won’t mean a thing if your site is not available 24x7x365.

So you also need to host your website with a reliable firm that can guarantee that your site is online and secure.

Your website is the centre of all your digital marketing activities. You must not toy with updating your site.

Doing so will only be harmful to your marketing efforts.

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