Keeping your website up to date so your business doesn’t go out of date

(Posted on 09/09/24)

Your website is the gateway to new business. It’s the chance to showcase all that your business does in one place to prospective customers and clients. This is why it’s so important to keep it up-to-date and make sure that everything still works.

 

With regards to your own website…

• Who looks after your website? Do you update it? Or a colleague? Or a web developer?

• Could you access it if you needed to? Do you have the login details? Can you gain the login details easily? And don’t worry, all is not lost, there are plenty of ways to recover lost access details. You shouldn’t need to build a whole new website from scratch!
• Is it built for mobile access? The latest figures from Statcounter show that mobile and tablet browsing accounts for 54% of the market share in the UK. Building responsive websites that work across different devices is essential to ensure a good user experience. If your website isn’t responsive, it is likely to be costing your business money. Research by Google shows that 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they’ve had difficulties accessing and 40% will go to a competitor instead. 

 

Quick wins

There are plenty of ways to give your website an instant refresh:

Updating content: Does it still reflect your business accurately, does any of the wording need updating? Do you need a new page for a new product or service you have started offering? Is the diary section up to date? Do you have any new case studies of projects you’d like to feature? This all helps to improve your credibility and authority in the industry.

Internal links: Do your pages link to where they need to go? For example, if you have a link on the homepage to your services page, does the link actually take you there?

Social media links: Do you have all of your social profiles included as icons on your website? Do the links all work?

New photos: Any new photos of technology? Are your team pictures reasonably recent? Are new starters on there and retirees removed? (remember, no cheesy thumbs up!)

Blogs: Writing and uploading blogs is one of the easiest ways of keeping your website up to date with content that keep people coming back for more. Blogs for your website could be written by yourself, or shared out to members of the team to keep the content fresh. Or, of course, outsourced to content professionals…

These could include:

• Adapting press releases (be careful re duplicating content)
• Market commentary – such as thoughts on technological innovation
• Thought pieces – perhaps on closing the skills gap, importance of apprenticeships
• Events you are attending
• Topics relevant to your clients
• New legislation and it what it might mean for your business.

Whether you write and share them weekly/fortnightly/monthly, prepare a schedule of blogs, three months at a time, so you are not scrabbling around looking for stories to share. Also, allow space in the schedule for adhoc news, so if something happens in the wider world of news that’s relevant to you, you can react to it accordingly.

 

Enhancing SEO

Keeping your website up to date with fresh content is also good for boosting your SEO rankings, so your business will be more likely to appear in search engine results when people are either directly looking for your business, or you appear when they are looking for the kind of services you offer.

 

Look at your own website…

• What three things do you like?
• What three things do you dislike?
• If you could change one thing, what would it be?

 

If it’s time for a website refresh, get in touch with our team today.