How to keep your website up to date

Content is still king, seriously

Before embarking upon writing a pile of articles to upload to your site, you need a well researched and focused keyword list, specific to your business. Then, once you have those key search terms you can begin writing content around each of those keywords. If you don’t have a blog, you really need to get one. It’s a great way to keep your site up to date and rank for those keywords you consider imperative to your business. If your stuck for ideas, here are a few blog ideas:

• Reviewing products and services is a great way to keep your source of content relevant and fresh as they’re always new. You can also review other articles that are relevant to yours, adding to what someone else has started – but don’t duplicate anything, as that’s plagiarism, no one likes a copy.
• In a similar vein – pay attention to what your competitors are writing about and put your own spin on the topic. Writing about current trends and popular themes is a good way of attracting people’s attention, but do it your own way.
• In with the old, in with the new. Once you begin to build up a backlog of old blog posts and content, they can provide you with a topic to revisit for a new article, bringing it into the here and now – this article being a case in point.

Keep up to date by visiting your own website regularly

When is the last time you visited your website? We don’t just mean when did you last type in the homepage, or search for your business name in Google. When was the last time that you looked at the content of your website in detail as potential customers could be doing? This might sound like a waste of your time; after all you wrote the content, you know it’s great! They say we should always have someone proof read our writing, the same goes for your site’s content as well.

A full site audit can be a seriously in-depth document that you, more than likely need to employ a specialist to do, but you can easily do a simple audit of your content just through careful reading. Start with your homepage and work your way through the site, is the content rich in the keywords that are important to your business? If not, time to a have re-write.

If a picture paints a thousand words, how about a video?

For a while there, images and definitely video were a way of posting content when you didn’t have the time or the inclination to write.

Images now provide your reader with some variety and make an otherwise wordy article both engaging and more aesthetically pleasing. So long as you make sure your Alt attributes for those images are relevant to the images you’ve used and the article they’re used in, both your users and Google will be happy.

Whether you’re a natural wordsmith or not – you need to be including video. The statistics for user engagement, retention of information and encouraging site traffic when using video are nothing short of intimidating. All signs point to a continuation of this trend, the key take away being – embrace video, lest you be forsaken.

On an encouraging note, video provides yet another source of content and every time you utilise a new medium, it brings a new flavour with it. Remember to create transcripts of videos posted to your site in order for Google bots to be able to tell how relevant the content and dialogue is within.

First impressions count – so bring it home

For a good portion of visitors, your homepage will be the first encounter with your site. Treat this as a one-off opportunity to engage with those visitors, as if it was the first time anyone had ever visited your site. Your branding must be coherent, your overriding message clear – but keep the page updated as the seasons change, use it to display special promotions and new blog posts. Take care not to clutter your home page, but to keep your website up to date, you need to update.

Save the date, save yourself

This might sound obvious for a blog post entitled ‘how to keep your website up to date’, but keeping your content up to date really is the most important thing you can do here. If you have promotions or events anywhere on your site, make sure to keep a checklist of when the date arrives and then remove that post as soon as its over.

Equally as frustrating as seeing events promoted that are long past their sell by date are ‘news’ items that are ancient history. If the last blog post on your news page is three years old, telling the world that you’ve ‘just had a new website built!’ then it’s time to review your content. Start at the top of this article, work your way through and you can’t go far wrong.

Have a chat with our content creators

If you’re searching for a quick fix, there isn’t one I’m afraid. The quality of your content has never been more important, Google is increasingly critical of how your sites content answers the queries we all type into its readily expectant tool bar. For those of us who are passionate about our business and have plenty to say, this is great news, though no less of a task.

Sometimes, a little help with content creation can go a long way – get in touch to see how we could help with creating varied and engaging content for your site.

And because we’re really kind and helpful, we’ve even made an eye-catching infographic that you can read and share and enjoy to your hearts content! You’re welcome!