Why updating your website is crucial for online success

Online marketing, Small business, Websites3 comments

A website can be a great way to communicate your products or services to your target market but it takes considerable planning and development to make your website truly effective.  However, the job doesn’t end with getting your site up and running; there’s the ongoing task of keeping it updated and maintained.

We all know about the necessities of regular maintenance.  This could be taking your car for an annual service, going to the gym every day or visiting the dentist for a check up!  Well the same thing goes for your website.  You might have spent a lot of money and effort creating it, but you’ll get no return on your investment unless you also spend time maintaining it.

Here are five reasons why maintaining your website is essential

• Adding fresh material regularly to your site will encourage visitors to keep coming back to see what’s new. This could be content such as blogs, latest news about your business or any upcoming events. Spending the time and resources to regularly update your site will help drive traffic to it and get it noticed by the search engines.

• Your website isn’t a printed brochure. Like all your marketing activities, it must evolve to meet the demands and needs of your target market.  This could involve adding functions such as a sign up form for your newsletter, video advertising, podcasts etc.  By using these different ways of communicating to your visitors, you help build a rapport with them which will encourage them to find out more about your products or services.

• Your website is only successful if people can find it on the search engines! Some search engines will not index your site unless your pages contain appropriate meta tags, well-structured content or error-free HTML code. This all requires ongoing supervision to ensure that your site remains visible on the listings.

• You should always keep an eye on your site to make sure that it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.  My website got hacked into a few months ago and instead of visitors seeing my lovely web pages, they got a black page with a message denouncing America! So keep a regular check on your site to ensure that all your files, folders and images are still intact, and your links are working properly.

• Regularly review the site statistics, ie how many people have visited the site, what pages they’ve viewed, and how long they’ve stayed. You can use tools such as Google Analytics to check what’s working and what’s not.  You can then make any necessary changes to improve traffic and visitor retention. Anyone who relies on their site for business purposes should monitor it daily or at least weekly.

If you’ve only got a small site for your business then maintenance should only take a few hours a month. However, this time is invaluable if you are going to use the site to sell your products and services. The success of any marketing activity relies on the amount of attention and resources that you put into it. A regularly updated website means you get the maximum return on your online investment.