Publishing your small business website is not the end of the process when it comes to presenting your business on the web. Maintenance of that website becomes a continuous activity and one of the most important tasks is managing the content.
The Benefits Of Updating Your Small Business Website’s Content
Managing your content regularly has several benefits for your business including:
- New content added to your site or your old content updated regularly keeps visitors coming back to see what’s new. While some sites can easily publish new content regularly (i.e. real estate, news, classified ad, social media) other sites require a little more planning. This is where creativity needs to be implemented. For instance, you could start a blog for your engineering firm or run a video series for your nonprofit organization.
- It allows your website to evolve with the current expectations and demands of your target audience. Online trends are constantly shifting; the rise in mobile-friendly websites is currently making them essential for any business. Customers want mobile websites to load within three seconds and just over half will abandon your brand’s site if it doesn’t. 30% of your visitors will also abandon a purchase if the shopping cart isn’t optimized for mobile browsers.
- Maintaining your website’s content helps your website to appear higher on search engine rankings. Google and other search engines are always looking for websites that are being regularly updated. They then index that information when determining rankings, so if a website is not updated for a while, a lowering of the site’s page rank will be seen.
- Allows you to build a strong profile to prove that you are an authority within your industry. Whether you want to be the top manufacturing firm in Michigan or a successful supplier to the automotive industry, you are going to be able to prove this by providing quality information to your audience. This can be done in a number of ways, for example: creating a blog, landing page or ebook. Whichever suits you, creating and publishing that content will help your business’ lead generation.
What Can You Use To Update Your Small Business Website?
There are several ways to update your small business website with fresh content to attract both high rankings on search engines and the continuous flow of new and returning visitors. One of the most popular ways is to run a blog for your business. A blog should contain highly useful information your reader can use.
Blogging
Blogs are the perfect marketing tool. Research has shown that businesses who regularly publish articles on their websites can receive up to 500% more traffic, up to 70% more leads and have 434% more indexed web pages. This all depends on the number of blog articles you produce per month, brands who produce 15 or more posts per month receive the most benefit.
Interesting News and Information
Another option for your business is to create a news section on your homepage. This is where you publish information that your audience may find interesting like events you are attending, news about your company’s employee’s, or new product releases.
Video
Alternatively you could create a video series. A video series either needs to be highly informative or entertaining. If it is neither of these two, then your video audience will not share it, and it may have limited effect. Videos however can be extremely useful for your online awareness. It is easier for audiences to emotionally invest in videos and the message you can portray in them is better received, and encourages action with more of your audience.
Existing Website Pages
Of course at the same time you shouldn’t ignore your static pages (Home Page, About Us, Services, etc). These should be regularly checked to make sure they are accurate and to make adjustments for better search engine optimization and readability.
Creating A Content Maintenance Schedule
In order to ensure that your small business website is completely up-to-date, you should consider creating and implementing a schedule. A schedule will provide you with the motivation and reason to carry out many tasks often forgotten about. For instance, often business blogs will fail within 90 days and other website maintenance tasks are ignored as workloads build up.
Creating a schedule is not difficult. The first task is to lay out everything that you need to do and how often.
You should be creating new content for your blog at least once or twice per month. Therefore schedule in times when you are going to research, write and edit those posts. Give at least one day for each task (although it may only take 1-2 hours per task). A good schedule for this would be to research the topic on Monday, write it on Tuesday and then edit it on Thursday to be published on Friday.
Next assign when you are going to release those articles. Ensure you stick to those publishing dates as readers like to see consistency on a blog.
Next you need to assign time to assess each static page you have on your website. You only need to check for accuracy about once a month. To make the task easier when you have a significant number of blog posts to check, spread them throughout the month so you’ll only do one page on a day.
Conclusion
Updating your website continually is an important task with your online marketing. A well maintained website will help your site rank well – ensuring that your target audience are visiting your site and not another. It will also provide evidence of your industry expertise.
Creating a schedule can be the hardest task; however, it will help motivate you, and help you to stay focused and not fall behind in the maintenance of your website content and online profile. You can use the above advice and a calendar to create the perfect content maintenance schedule for your business.
Take action
- Create a schedule to regularly check and implement updates to your website.
- Talk to us about how we can improve your website.
Do you regularly update your website, what are your experiences?
by NJE Design