Your website is your presence on the web and this is extremely important because it’s often the first impression people get of you or your company. The importance of keeping your website up-to-date cannot be stressed enough, as this will determine what type of image you present.
Many small businesses feel that simply having a website is enough, however their website will very quickly become dated without attention.
It is obvious to a visitor when content on your website is out of date. News articles dated from two years ago is an obvious giveaway. But there are many other signs of a website in need of attention. If a website is neglected it is likely that your service offering has evolved, staff members have changed and industry regulations have reformed since the launch of your site.
The importance of a fresh-looking website can’t be underestimated. Visitors are less likely to trust a website that appears outdated or substandard, and yesterday’s professional website design might make your website look out-of-touch today. Making regular updates to your website can help you keep up with prevalent online trends as well as improving its usability and visual appeal.
There are many reasons to keeping your website current, here are our top 4:
- New visitors recognise fresh content: If you are able to share your company news and offer advice about industry news on your website this will really help to generate a strong online impression. If visitors to your website perceive that your content is not fresh, they may look at it once or twice and more than likely they will not return again.
- Ensure visitors keep coming back: When a person visits your website and reads the content, they may bookmark your site and return again in the future to see what is new. After a period of time when there are no updates, people assume it is not going to change and will stop coming back. It is often these returning visitors who are most likely to become your customers, not only do they like what you have to say, but they are interested enough to keep in touch. In this way, as with social media, your website acts as a networking tool to business contacts you may never have actually talked to, potentially keeping in touch with thousands of valuable contacts.
- Getting ahead of competitors: By not updating your website content regularly, you are providing your competitors with an advantage. Even if they are not currently updating their websites, if they were to start tomorrow, they would leave you behind. It can be a daunting task initially knowing where to start so if you are able to get several team members involved with the site updates this will help to ease the load and make it more manageable to keep on top of on a regular basis.Readers are not the only ones looking for fresh content. Other website and bloggers are always interested in featuring links to new and interesting materials on their own websites. You can attract links from others websites by regularly refreshing your web content, which can dramatically improve your website traffic and search engine rankings.Updating your website content is one of the most important things you can do to guarantee the long-term success of your website. Static information on the web does not hold up well over time, so look for exciting ways that you can refresh your website on a regular basis. Blogs, online forums and social media feeds are a few possible options to ensure a steady stream of new content appears on your website.
- Linking with other websites: generating links from other websites is a great way of getting visitors to your website and this can also drastically improve your search engine ranking. Getting quality websites to link to you can be a very difficult task, reputable websites do not link to every website that comes along and asks for a link, only those that offer some valuable information. Although you may be able to get some links to your website, even if your website is static, you can get more and better quality links if your website is fresh and ever changing. Of course to improve search engine rankings you should also be generating your own links to your website from social media platforms and blogs.
By investing time and effort into updating your website, you can dramatically improve your marketing success, search engine rankings and user results.
If you simply don’t have the time to update your website and would like our help getting you ahead of your competitors, please get in touch with us Libby at Entyce 01244 310140