When first setting up your website, I can almost guarantee you spent time making sure it consisted of a mix of good content and strong messaging. Fast forward and through a lack of maintenance, suddenly your carefully curated site is feeling outdated and inconsistent - which will naturally affect rankings and first impressions.
Don’t worry, this is not a solo experience, but here’s my top advice on how to avoid falling victim to this trap.
First, let’s get into the why. Why should you be regularly maintaining your website content?
* SEO performance: Search engines favour fresh and relevant content.
* Trust and credibility: If a prospective customer visits your website and sees outdated content, it screams unreliability.
* Conversions: You’re more likely to see conversions when your messaging is clear and up to date.
* Brand consistency: As your business evolves, your website should too.
If you were to take a look at your website right now and complete an honest audit, where do you fall short?
A website with old services or products, incorrect pricing, expired offers, or broken links needs to be updated.
Strong messaging should be targeted at the right audience, benefit-led (not just descriptive) and importantly, help users understand what you do almost instantly.
A blog that isn’t being updated, along with a website filled with duplicate content, is a cause for concern from an SEO perspective.
Keeping a well-maintained website stems from consistency. Different parts of your site will need revisiting more frequently than others. A good rule of thumb is to update your:
* Core pages: every 3 to 6 months
* Blogs: Monthly
* Offers and services: Whenever changes happen
Alongside, completing monthly quick checks to catch any links or small tweaks that fall outside of the above.
To keep on top of my website content maintenance, I have adopted a few practices to make this easier. For instance, setting a monthly content check reminder will ensure you visit your site monthly to make any necessary tweaks. As your business evolves, keep a list of any updates. This will make updating services or general information on your website easy. Be sure to regularly refresh CTAs and headlines and repurpose content from other channels so that everything aligns.
Whilst maintenance of your website content is important for success, I appreciate it’s a time-consuming task. If you’re time-limited, a preferable solution is enlisting the support of a professional. Whether it’s a copy audit or content refresh, I’d love to help - get in contact and let’s chat.