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One of the most frequent conversations I have with clients is how they can keep their website content fresh and up to date. It’s important to have some elements of fresh content on a website, even if you don’t have a blog. Not only does it make your site more interesting to customers when they find it, but keeps the search engines happy by encouraging them to crawl your site more often.
If you have an online shop with regular turnover of stock, there’s always fresh content on the site, but ensure you keep the home page updated too by featuring products and special offers, even changing images each month. It’s not that far removed from how bricks and mortar stores need to keep encouraging customers through their doors with seasonal sales & regularly changing window displays to reflect new stock. Remember that fresh content isn’t only written content, but includes images, video – anything that can help sell.
For service based businesses, it can be more difficult to keep content up to date, as there may be less going on than with a retailer. Services may not change much, and this is where you may need to be a bit more creative. If you have the time or resource, it’s well worth setting up a blog and post to it fairly regularly to show off your expertise, as that’s how a lot of business service providers sell themselves. If a blog isn’t for you, at least have a couple of pages that can be kept up to date. Start with a news page and update it each month with what’s happening in your industry, perhaps some events you’ve attended, any staff news, a bit of opinion or comment. You should also add a link from the home page to your latest news so your home page is more interesting to visitors and it encourages them to click through and browse your site.
As with online retailers, if images and video can be used to plug your services, use those too, so you don’t just have to rely on written content.
Whatever you do, when you commit to your website you need to commit to keeping it up to date, after all, that’s what’s going to keep potential customers’ interest and contribute towards sales and enquiries!
If you’ve got some creative ways of keeping your website up to date, we’d love to hear from you!
About Sam
Sam McArthur is an internet marketing consultant with 12 years in the industry. She helps professional service businesses with their internet marketing strategy, helping them to see significant results from their online marketing activities, particularly within the search engines. She also consults on the latest internet tools, technology and best practice techniques.
