Your website is the most valuable resource for interacting with your audience. It’s where they go for answers directly from the source, to learn more about your products and services, and to decide to work with you––or not.
Updating your website content regularly means that site traffic is more likely to be happy with what they find on your site rather than bouncing off immediately.
Not only are there benefits to your organic traffic, but your website will also look better to potential customers and be more likely to keep functioning as designed. Let’s dig into how keeping your website up to date helps to drive business online.
Up-to-Date Websites Have Better SEO
Google loves new content, often rewarding the freshest and most accurate content with the highest rankings. If your best-performing piece of content is three years old, you can expect your rankings to drop if they haven’t already been relegated to the second or third page of the search results.
Not only should you maintain a consistent content schedule, such as your blog, whitepapers, videos, and more, but your main site pages should also be updated regularly. How often are your competitors refreshing their positioning or messaging? To keep your business relevant within your industry, it makes sense to stay on top of all your website content as well as you can.
Keep Your Design Fresh to Potential Customers
The content on your website isn’t the only thing that needs to be properly maintained. The look and feel of your website, the design itself, should also be routinely updated or refreshed so your business doesn’t become stale. If you’ve been using the same colors, logos, and design features on your website, your audience might start to tune you out in favor of a competitor’s newer, more enticing offering.
Think of your website design as a series of ever-evolving experiments. How well is your homepage design, for example, driving people to your most important calls to action? Would changing some colors, images, videos, or more major pieces of your design keep them more engaged? Would you see your bounce rate, time on the page, and other metrics improve? It could be worth an experiment.
Pay Attention to Your Website’s Tech Foundation
Since you’re already been logging into the backend of your website frequently to update content or experiment with new designs, you’re also more likely to notice other things that have become outdated, such as your website’s technical foundation.
Ensure all of your website plugins are up to date and all of the links or functionality on your site is working smoothly. This not only creates the best experience for your potential customers as possible, but it also helps things like website security. These outdated or broken features could lead to security vulnerabilities that hackers could use as an access point into the heart of your business. That’s the last thing you want.
Keep Your Website Up to Date and High Performing
Visitors to your website are likely to get discouraged or bounce if your content, design, and functionality are outdated or broken. If content is missing or hasn’t been updated in months, how can customers trust that you’ll be responsive to their needs?
Keep your website up to date to reap the benefits of your SEO performance, keep your design fresh in the minds of customers, and make sure that everything is functioning properly. You’ll be surprised how much stronger your website is in helping your business grow.