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5 Simple Tips for Keeping Your Website Updated

August 30, 2016

Website Update Tips

Keeping your website updated is critical to the success of your online marketing efforts.

Unfortunately, many business owners take the “set it and forget it” approach once their site is up and running.

How often do you update your website?

Why Is Keeping Your Website Updated Important?

Today, Google demands that you keep your website updated regularly, or your SEO ranking will suffer. In fact, if you don’t continually add fresh content and mix things up a bit, Google may consider your site dead and you will plummet in the search engine rankings accordingly.

Keep Website Updated

Google regularly sends out web-crawling “bots” to scan the internet for website updates. When the bot comes calling at your site and finds nothing new to report, it moves on to the next site.

If you have made recent updates, however, the bot prompts Google to re-index your site and make note of the changes.

The more frequently Google finds a reason to re-index your site, the more you are rewarded. One caveat to this axiom, however: Website updates must meet Google’s high standards of content quality, so be careful about what and how you change your site.

Why Don’t Businesses Update Their Websites?

The two most common reasons that businesses don’t update their websites are that owners and managers don’t realize the importance of updating, or they simply don’t know how to make the appropriate changes.

No Website Updates

Business owners also are concerned about the time and cost involved with updating their websites. If you used a professional web design company for your site’s original content, you may have no idea how to update it.

Fortunately, you can keep your site updated easily and affordably with our simple tips!

Tip No. 1: Update Your Website Images

Adding images is a simple and effective way to keep your website updated. Internet users find images highly engaging, and adding the right images to your site will encourage your visitors to stay longer.

Update Website Images

The secret to making your images more effective is adding captions, descriptions and tags that leverage your keywords and phrases. SEO experts use this method regularly to boost website search engine rankings.

Stick with high-quality images that you are legally allowed to use for your site’s headers, sliders and other prominent locations. But you can use your own images too, of your customers, employees or your business in action. You can frequently change these images too, as a way to keep your website updated.

Tip No. 2: Freshen Up Graphic Elements and Logos

A fresh, professional appearance is the key to making that crucial first impression. If you aren’t ready for a new website just yet, you can work toward a more appealing interface with one or two website updates at a time.

Graphic Elements and Logo

Another great tip for keeping your website updated regularly is to work on tweaking your logo, typeface and other graphic elements. Include some well-designed charts or graphs to illustrate your content. Adding videos is also a popular and effective way to keep your website updated.

Finally, consider spending some time updating your site’s overall design. Today, it’s all about a sleek, streamlined user experience and how easily your visitors can find what they’re looking for on your site. If prospects have to hunt for what they want, they’re likely to move on to a more engaging competitor’s site.

Tip No. 3: Update Your Website Menu Pages with Fresh Content

Your website’s content is more important than you may realize — to your prospects and customers, and to Google.

Update Website Content

Every page should have plenty of content describing your products and services as well as your company’s mission and purpose. If you’ve ever happened onto a business website and struggled to understand what they do, you’ll understand why this is relevant. But it’s important for other reasons as well.

If you have customers who frequently visit your site, updating your content will help keep it fresh and engaging for them. Google also will reward you for making regular updates and additions to page content, as we learned above in our discussion about bots and indexing.

Don’t forget about updating your website’s homepage. Many business sites don’t include substantial content on the homepage, and consequently, they miss out on all the benefits this can provide.

Tip No. 4: Leverage Your Authority and Expertise

Google respects authority.

When internet users launch a Google search, they are usually looking for useful information. If you’ve ever searched for some practical information or how-to advice, you know how frustrating it can be if all the top results want to sell you products or services.

Authority and Expertise

Instead of trying to sell yourself, use your expertise to provide valuable information. The more meaningful and engaging your content, the more valuable it is to Google, and to you.

By updating your website with useful, high-quality content, you can impress Google with your level of authority in your industry. And if you do this frequently enough, the search engine results will reflect your efforts.

Tip No. 5: Add a Blog to Your Website

This is, without question, one of the easiest and most effective ways to ensure that your site constantly has fresh, valuable and engaging content.

Blog Website

You can use your site’s blog to provide practical tips and how-to posts. You can feature a customer of the month (especially helpful if you’re in a B2B industry), or post employee profiles periodically. You can use your blog to provide updates of new product launches, talk about recent developments in your industry or share information about an award you’ve won.

Blogs are incredibly versatile, and perfect for adding images, videos and infographics. Google is also quite fond of blogs, especially when they are included as a component of your website. You’ll get more bang for your SEO buck with regular blog posts than almost any other type of website update.

Don’t Forget the Important Details

You can update your website every day, but if you overlook the important details, it may not have the results you hoped for.

Important Details

Be sure to include your keywords and key phrases appropriately in all of your website updates, but only to the extent it makes sense in context — no keyword stuffing! And, if you’re a locally based business, don’t forget to add geo-tags that correspond to your Google local profile.

One last tip: Don’t forget about the NAP formatting! NAP is the protocol of consistent formatting of your company’s name, address and phone number. Anywhere and everywhere that your NAP is found online, ensure that they are formatted exactly the same. Every detail counts for Google’s locally based algorithms, so always keep this in mind!

Be Locally SEO works diligently on keeping our customers’ sites fresh and relevant with frequent updates. With an up-to-the-minute understanding of what Google wants to see, our efforts are exceptionally effective for improving and maintaining search engine rankings. Learn more about improving your SEO resultscontact us today to discuss the best strategies for keeping your website updated and fresh.

 

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