Why updating your website is important for online success

Last updated on July 26th, 2012Online marketing, Small business, Websites5 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 updating your website is important for online success

Regularly adding fresh material encourages visitors to keep coming back. 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.  You can use a sign up form for your newsletter, video advertising, and podcasts etc to communicate to your visitors and build a rapport with them.

Your website is only successful if people can find it! Search engines love fresh content so keep your website updated – blogs are a great way to do this. Also ensure that your content features the target keywords that people are using to search for the services or products that you offer.

Is your website still there?. My website got hacked into 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. You can check to see if your site does go down with tools such as Pingdom.

Know your visitors. Use tools such as Google Analytics to track how many people have visited the site, what pages they’ve viewed, and how long they’ve stayed. 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 weekly or at least monthly.

If you’ve only got a small site for your business then maintenance should only take a few hours a month. However, you may not have the time or skills to do this yourself, so consider hiring a virtual assistant to do it for you. Check out our website management services to see how we can help you keep your website maintained so that it will attract more visitors and have greater visibility online.

Valerie Eaton

Valerie Eaton provides virtual PA and online marketing services to self-employed professionals who are feeling overwhelmed by their workload and want more time to focus on growing their business.

Connect with Valerie on Google+